Chasing omega, p.4
Chasing Omega, page 4
You’ve heard the expression “a hail of shrapnel.” That was what we had here–a spray of glass shards from the carafe, followed by an eruption of metal and plastic fragments. The coffeemaker had blown up.
Strain went down, shouting. His face was bloodied, but I couldn’t see how badly he was hurt. The explosion had shorted out the power, throwing the office into darkness. The only light came from the sputtering flames where the pooled oil smoked.
Goldman had caught some glass in his cheek. He stood there looking stunned. I broke a chair over him, knocking him to the carpet.
That left Sachs. His gun was out, and he could have shot me, but he didn’t. I wasn’t sure why. I would have shot him if our positions had been reversed.
Rather than ponder the question, I grabbed his gun hand and forced the weapon away from me. The two of us did a little dance, spinning together in the office while the end table smoldered, casting a flickering glow over the scene. It might have been romantic if some nice music had been playing. Something by Cole Porter, maybe.
Sadly, romance wasn’t in the air. Sachs grabbed my throat with his free hand and squeezed. It wasn’t your classic chokehold, but it would put me under in about ten seconds. With no better options, I bulled my way forward, driving him into the counter. The slam of Formica against his tailbone loosened his grip. I risked releasing his gun hand and thumped his head against the register, hard enough to make the cash drawer fly open with a brrnnng.
Then he was out. I looked for his gun, but he’d dropped it somewhere, and I didn’t have time to hunt it down. Goldman was coming to, and Strain was struggling to his feet. I glanced around for Claire, but she was already out the door.
She’d fled at the first opportunity, leaving me to risk taking a bullet. I had to admire her for that.
CHAPTER 3
I caught up with her by the Rambler. She was behind the wheel, trying to start the engine, but getting nowhere.
“Scooch over,” I said, pulling open the door on the driver’s side.
When she didn’t oblige, I climbed in and shoved her into the passenger seat, then nursed the engine to life and swung out of the parking lot.
Goldman and Sachs stumbled into view, crowding the doorway to Chuck’s office. But they didn’t shoot at us. I doubted they could hit a moving target in the dark.
Then we were on the highway, running west, and the gas station was a receding blur in the rearview mirror.
“Do you believe me now?” she demanded, her voice raised to be heard over the rush of wind.
“I don’t know what to believe. We’ll sort it all out when we get where we’re going.”
“Where’s that?”
“Hicksburg.” I pointed ahead. The town was a dim, rusty glow on the horizon. “Just a few more miles.”
She looked over her shoulder. “They’re not after us yet.”
“Maybe they won’t follow. Maybe I put a scare in ’em.”
“You believe that?”
“Nope.”
“When you say we’ll sort it out …”
“I’m not planning to put you in a cell, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t want you locked up.”
“Finally, something we agree on.”
Chuck’s gas station was the last outpost of civilization, such as it was, until Hicksburg. This stretch of road was a straight shot through empty desert, with not even a billboard to hint at the possibility of other human beings in the world. I pushed the Rambler to the max, not worrying about traffic at this hour.
“So if you no longer want me locked up,” she said, “then what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet. I only know I don’t trust Goldman and Sachs, and I really don’t trust their boss.”
“I wish I hadn’t.”
“You’re telling me Strain dressed up as an orderly and helped you bust out?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure you didn’t just see him around the building and imagine this whole orderly thing?”
“Did I imagine that he gave me the passkey? Did I imagine that I escaped?”
“The fact that you got free doesn’t prove anyone helped you.”
“So you still think I’m a mental patient.”
I took a moment to answer that. The car bounced hard on a rut in the road. There’s not a lot of money in Santa Cruz County, and upkeep isn’t a top priority.
“Remember what I said in the bathroom, about how my motives were getting complicated? What I meant was, part of me was starting to believe you.”
“That’s a great comfort.” She considered what I’d said. “How big a part of you?”
“Not the majority. The majority is still skeptical. But there’s an active minority putting up a vigorous dissent.”
“That’s a convoluted way of saying you’re mostly unconvinced.”
“I’m divided. I don’t know what to think about you. The things you say sound crazy, but not the way you say them. What’s in the satchel?”
The change of topic caught her off guard. “Excuse me?” Instinctively she clutched the bag tighter.
“Strain was very interested in it. What’s inside?”
“Something I stole,” she said reluctantly.
“Something the institute wants back?”
“Yes.”
“Something Strain would want badly enough to kill for?”
“Possibly. I–I don’t know. What makes you think he’s even capable of killing?”
“Just a vibe I got.”
“I thought you weren’t psychic.”
“It’s not a sixth sense. More like street smarts.”
“The difference may be less clear-cut than you assume.”
I know, I know–she never actually answered my question. She hadn’t told me what was in the satchel. Even so, I was beginning to see how the pieces fit together … if she was telling the truth.
On the other hand, if she was crazy, then I was only participating in her fantasy. Shrinks call it a folie a deux.
First Latin, now French. Yes, I am a man of parts.
“After all that’s happened,” she said, “I honestly don’t understand how you can still be skeptical.”
“I’m skeptical by nature.”
“About the paranormal?”
“About everything. Government conspiracies in particular. That’s tinfoil-hat time.”
“Why, exactly?”
“For one thing, I just can’t see the government investing money to study psychics. It sounds like that Stephen King movie, the one with Drew Barrymore when she was a little girl. Which was fiction.” I stressed the word.
“You think the government doesn’t conduct research on the paranormal?”
“I sincerely hope not.”
“Then you’d be disappointed. From 1972 to 1995, the Defense Department, the CIA, and other agencies spent millions of dollars on something called the Stargate project. Its main focus was remote viewing.” She saw my puzzled look. “Clairvoyance. Test subjects were given a set of geographical coordinates and asked to visualize what was there.”
“And obviously they got nowhere,” I said, “if the project was shut down.”
“You really think Stargate would have gone on for twenty-three years with no results? Some of the readings were amazingly accurate. But the results were inconsistent. That’s why psi is called a wild talent. It’s hard to control, even for an experienced psychic.”
“So there was no practical value.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. Remote viewers directed a salvage team to a crashed Soviet plane in Zaire. There were other successes. But there were enough misses to erode confidence in the whole program. So it was canceled. Officially,” she added in a meaningful way.
“If the government was still looking into this stuff, it would be common knowledge.”
“Stargate wasn’t common knowledge until years after it was closed down. Much of the research is still classified. What makes you think the situation would be different now?”
“Even so, this Stargaze thing–”
“Stargate.”
“–had nothing to do with life after death.”
“All of it ties together. If the mind can operate outside the body, then the mind can go on, even when the body has stopped functioning.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way. It made a certain amount of sense.
“The point is,” she went on, “the government has studied psychic abilities in the past, and there’s no reason to think they aren’t doing so right now.”
I blew past a jackrabbit frozen on his haunches, straddling the center line. He looked as rattled as I felt.
“I still don’t get it. How do you study the afterlife in a lab? It’s like using a mass spectrometer to test for witchcraft. No offense.”
“Why would I possibly take offense at that?” she shot back. “In principle, testing mediums isn’t hard. You learn the standard mentalist tricks and devise test conditions that rule them out. Some mentalists play off the sitter’s responses. So you put the medium and the sitter in separate rooms, or at different ends of a telephone call, with the sitter’s end of the call muted. Or you use a proxy sitter–a standin who doesn’t know anything about the deceased. Other mentalists research the sitter’s family. So you keep the sitter’s identity secret, bring in a new sitter under an assumed name for an unscheduled appointment, or even take the medium to a foreign country where she doesn’t know anyone.”
“People have done all that?”
“All that, and more. It’s amazing, the lengths some investigators have gone to. They have to anticipate every skeptical objection.”
“Even so, I’m betting the skeptics haven’t been won over.”
“Some have. Many researchers started out as skeptics. And there are prominent names among them. William James, for instance. Alfred Russel Wallace, who helped develop the theory of natural selection. Oliver Lodge, a famous physicist. Charles Richet, a Nobel Prize winner–”
“Okay, fine. Some of the grand poohbahs of science have been all wackadoodle for this stuff.”
“Not just scientists, but other creative people. Victor Hugo channeled spirits while in exile on the Isle of Jersey. James Merrill used a Ouija board to write The Changing Light at Sandover. Sylvia Plath used one, too. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was interested in spiritualism. Pearl Curran wrote bestselling books by channeling a spirit named Patience Worth. Mark Twain had an active interest in psychic phenomena. Arthur Conan Doyle–”
“So some writers are nuts. And some scientists are loopy. Who didn’t know that?”
“That’s a remarkably stupid way of looking at it. Why should intellectual curiosity be limited to the physical world? Creative minds can’t be boxed in. Even Abraham Lincoln attended séances in the White House, and by some accounts he was encouraged to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in a session with a trance medium.”
“I don’t need a history lesson, because here’s where your story falls apart. You said yourself that the government was trying to develop people with psychic abilities in that Starburst project.”
“Stargate.”
“Whatever. Trying to train psychics, use them. Which makes a certain amount of sense. If–and I emphasize if–there really are people with ESP, then you’d want them tuning in to Al Qaeda or that crazy little butterball in North Korea. But, and here’s the rub, in this case they shut down your psychic talents. Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Training intelligence officers in ESP could make sense in a science-fiction sort of way. But preventing people from using their ESP … there’s no payoff in that.”
“You never know.”
“Are you suggesting there is a payoff?”
“Possibly.” She was looking over her shoulder again. “I can’t be sure. But–”
He appeared in my headlights then–a man in the middle of the road. Nondescript, disheveled, blank-faced.
Directly in front of me. Impossible to avoid.
I tried, anyway. I jerked the wheel hard to the right, and the Rambler slewed sideways, the headlights sliding past the man in the road–and as they did, I could have sworn the beams sliced through him, as if pockets of empty air were opening in his body, and just before he blurred out of sight, he seemed to … melt away. His body fell apart, unraveled, a gossamer thing, a sugar confection exposed to the sun, or a mirage, dissipating in waves of heat, and vanishing like smoke.
I had no time to think about it. The Rambler screamed off the road and slammed into a ditch, coming to rest at a crazy angle, the chassis canted, the tires on the driver’s side lifted off the ground. The engine choked and died.
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered. It was not a religious sentiment, I’m sorry to say.
Claire was twisted in her seat, staring at me in angry bewilderment. “What the hell?”
“Sorry. Sorry.” I tried to catch my breath. “You okay?”
“Yes, I think so. No thanks to you. Why in God’s name did you drive us off the road?”
“It was that guy–he came out of nowhere.”
“What guy?”
“The man in the road. Didn’t you see him?”
“I was looking behind us.” She pulled herself to a standing position and surveyed the area. “Did you hit him?”
“I–I don’t think so.” I thought I’d gone right through him, but it didn’t seem like the best thing to say.
“So … where is he?” she asked.
I followed her gaze. The road was empty.
“Nowhere,” I said softly.
She sighed. “Well, he can join the club. It looks like we’re nowhere, too.”
I couldn’t argue. I’d wrecked the car. You didn’t have to be a mechanic to know the Rambler’s rambling days were over.
I gave the ignition key a desultory twist, just to see what would happen. Answer: nothing.
“Wonderful,” Claire said. She began climbing over the crushed door on the passenger side.
“There was a man. I saw him.” I hated the pleading note in my voice. “He was right in front of us. And then he–I don’t know–he sort of … dissolved.”
I thought she would laugh or call me crazy. She did neither. She turned to me, alarm in her face. “Dissolved?”
“I know it sounds ridiculous ...”
She shook her head–a single quick jerk, like a dog tugging at a chain. “It’s them. It’s one of their tricks.”
“What kind of trick?”
“I don’t know, but they did it. They made us crash so they could catch up with us.” She was scrambling out of the vehicle now. “We have to get away from here.”
I must have caught some of her paranoia, because I found myself hurrying to extricate myself from the Rambler. Halfway out, I remembered the cell phone in my glove compartment. I was about to pocket it when I thought of how Strain and his men had traced my license plate. With resources like that, they might be able to track my cell’s GPS signal. In fact, they could be doing it already.
I tossed the phone on the floor of the car and crushed it to pieces under my boot. What the hell, I’d been in the market for an upgrade anyhow.
By the time I struggled out of the ravine, Claire was already on the road, actually tapping her foot in impatience. Honest to God. Tapping.
“It’s not far to Hicksburg,” I said. “We can cut across the desert.”
“On foot?”
“How else?”
“Aren’t there rattlesnakes and coyotes and things?”
“It’s safer than strolling through Central Park.”
“That’s not quite the comfort you may think it is.”
“Well, we can always walk along the highway and hope Strain and his pals swing by to give us a lift.”
She paled. At least I thought she did. She was pretty pale to begin with, so it was difficult to tell.
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t think I want to do that.”
“Then I’m afraid we don’t have a lot of options, Claire.”
She looked at me with something other than anger or disdain. Something like affection. “That’s the first time you’ve called me by name, you know.”
“Is it? I’ve been calling you plenty of names in my head.”
Way to spoil the moment.
She didn’t say anything after that, and neither did I. Together we crossed the road and headed into the brush. I looked back at the convertible abandoned in the ditch and felt a twinge of regret. The Rambler was long past her best days, but I was sorry to see her go.
Then we were tramping toward the low rise of a distant hill. She was holding her satchel and warily scanning the ground for rattlers.
I didn’t bother looking down. Worse things than snakes were hunting us tonight.
CHAPTER 4
As we walked, I thought about the man who had appeared and vanished. A trick, Claire had said, but I didn’t buy it. There was no technology I knew of that could produce an illusion like that–a hologram or some damn thing, projected out of nowhere into thin air.
But if it wasn’t a high-tech gimmick, then what the hell was it? I could think of only two possibilities–a hallucination brought on by stress, or something genuinely supernatural.
I’d never hallucinated before. But the other option was unacceptable. So maybe I was going crazy. More to the point, maybe the woman at my side was making me crazy.
We hiked fast over sloping hills, past clusters of spiky vegetation. The big moon swam through tissuey wisps of cirrus. Hicksburg beckoned in the distance, a scatter of sleepy lights, unwinking in the deathly still, dust-dry desert air.
I have a touch of the poet in me. Sue me.
Whenever I looked back, I saw no bobbing flashlights, no sign of pursuit. They were coming, though. I was sure of that. Goldman and Sachs and their puppet master, Mr. Philip Strain, were on the trail. And Claire, in her white blouse and slacks, would stand out in the moonlight like a target on the range.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked as we topped another rise. It was the first time she’d spoken in twenty minutes.
