The Grays (28 page)

“The grays are acting against us in a major and very bizarre way.”

“The grays are acting bizarre? You’re kidding. I sit here astonished.”

Charles had constructed his lie carefully. “Sir, they’re going to do something that will reveal to the public the fact that the government’s been concealing their presence for sixty years. They’re going to destroy our credibility.”

The president pointed a finger at his own temple.

“Exactly. They’re trying to undermine the government. First, the public becomes aware that they’re real. Second, people tell about their abductions. Third, it’s discovered that we’re helpless. Chaos follows.”

The president was silent for a moment. “And, for some reason, you can’t get control of this situation, which is why you’re here. First, tell me why it’s out of control. Second, tell me what you need.”

“It’s not out of control.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Sir, I need a TR-A. I need to surveil in the area where this disclosure event took place.”

“You have TR-A1.”

“Mike Wilkes is using it. He’s on detail out there now, but he needs backup.”

“Okay, you’ve got another TR. I’ll cut orders for you to have access to one. What else?”

“I need some people killed,
toute suite
.”

“Just do what you gotta do.”

“You need to be aware that one of them is Mr. Crew.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Exactly. Our friend from the beyond is not our friend.”

“He’s—what’s he done?”

“He’s giving the grays support.”

“Next.”

“I need one other thing.”

“Hit me.”

Charles smiled. “I don’t want to hit you. I want you to hit Wilton, Kentucky, with an earthquake. Enough to disrupt the place and reduce the college that’s there to rubble.”

The president stared at him for some little time. “Why?” he asked at last.

“We need a diversion so that we can clean up all the principles. We need it to look accidental. All the folks who were present during the disclosure event.”

“I see.” He looked down at the top of his desk. This time, his silence extended even longer. When he spoke, his voice was soft with what Charles knew must be pain. “You know, it feels like the best day in your life when you walk for the first time into the White House as president. President of the United States—wow, and wow again. Then you find out the secrets, and you spend the rest of your life in mourning.”

“Mr. President, this will be a very localized hit. It’s not going to activate any fault lines, nothing like that. We’ll see significant disruption and a few deaths, obviously. It will be a cover for us to sterilize the area. We’ll confiscate all original video, and deal with the people who were firsthand witnesses. We have assets already at work who will get a local physics professor who saw the thing to debunk it. Our media people will see to it that his message gets spread far and wide. But the damage and the deaths will be the minimum necessary, let me assure you of that. I feel the same way you do about the American people, of course.”

“You’re assuring me that this will not do any more than the minimum damage necessary?”

“Absolutely. It will be very precisely contained. We’ll have a TR directing the pulses from the immediate vicinity of the target.”

“And the grays are not going to react adversely? That is one limb I sure as hell don’t want to go out on.”

“Sir, again, there is no way. They are not going to be able to connect the dots, as it were.”

“I’ll redeploy the scalar weapon.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll call you when I need it fired.”

God only knew what the grays would do to the president after he unleashed a scalar pulse that devastated the whole center of the United States and threw all of their plans awry. One thing was certain, Charles planned to stay far, far away from this particular moron after he pulled that particular trigger.

“I have a state dinner in an hour. I gotta go over to the rathole and put on my monkey suit, and spend the evening with the prime minister of Thailand—whose name I will never, ever learn to pronounce—who is here to whine at me about some damn thing or other.”

He stood up. The interview was at an end.

MIKE WILKES LAY IN HIS
motel room trying to do anything except worry about the next few days. He had a difficult, complex task, and if the grays detected him, he was going to be something worse than dead meat. Over the years, they’d found bodies of people who had been attacked by the grays, mostly airmen who’d gone too close in the early days, when Truman was still trying to shoot them out of the sky.

They would have their lips cut off, their eyes and tongues gouged out, and their genitals removed. There would generally be seawater in their lungs, no matter where the bodies were found. The grays would cut them up, drown them, then leave them as warnings. The grays could very definitely be crossed, and this particular action was certain to qualify.

He really did not feel so comfortable right now, sitting in this dismal little hole of a room and, frankly, waiting to start getting cut to pieces by somebody he couldn’t even see. He’d long held that the grays couldn’t read minds beyond a few feet, and that they had trouble even understanding what was going on in the human mind. But lying here on this bug-ridden bed watching Jay Leno wish he could suck any part of his guest, Drew Barrymore, he feared that the opposite might be true.

His only chance was speed. If he could get this done by tomorrow night, he could be back in D.C. by noon on Wednesday, and maybe he would be okay.
Maybe
.

AT ALFRED AFB, THE FLIGHT
line was being used for foul-weather training runs, and the sound of engines being fired up and jets screaming off into the
night could be heard clearly in the disused office block where Lauren Glass and Rob Langford had been together for hours. Since he had caught up with her last night, he had not let her out of his sight.

And now that she’d understood that there were two opposing groups within the Air Force, she was glad that she had ended up with Rob. She had never liked Colonel Wilkes, and had not been surprised to discover the danger he posed to her.

She sat across from Rob in the office, watching the snow sift past the windows. She was exhausted, and she was hoping that he would soon let her rest.

He remained formal and distant, though, and showed no sign of either becoming more at ease or of offering her a place to sleep.

She wished it was not so. He was a lovely man, handsome in a way that made her want him, simply and frankly. His eyes were gray and intense, but also had a sort of wide-open look to them, as if he was as friendly as he was dedicated. They were the eyes of somebody who worked hard, but, she thought, also liked to have fun.

He did not trust her. There was a secret he wanted to tell her, but he was wary. If he decided that she was the enemy, what then?

She knew what then. She just didn’t want to think about it.

“Tell me again about your relationship with Adam,” he asked. In all these hours, she had not refused to answer a question, no matter how often he had repeated it. She knew this interrogation technique. She would let him use it. She would cooperate fully.

“I’ve been with somebody who shared the life of my soul,” she said. “I don’t think he was a predator like Mike said. Losing him has left a hole in my life, almost as bad as when my dad died.”

“That’s not what you said the last time.”

“I’m being creative.”

What you said was, “They aren’t predators, but I think they’re missing something they know we have, and they’re trying to get it.”

Rob could not take his eyes of Lauren Glass. It wasn’t just her beauty, it was the trembling, delicate play of emotions in her eyes as she spoke about Adam. He could see that the love was genuine, entirely so. But there was also something furtive about Lauren, as if, on some level, she might be lying to herself, and might at least sense that.

This long, repetitive interrogation was leading to a judgement. When he
was finished with it, he would draw his conclusions and her life would either continue or it would not. He wondered if she knew, decided to assume that she did. “So tell me, are the grays a danger to us? How do you feel about that?”

“I guess I miss Adam more because I know he’s somewhere. If he’d died in the fire, that would have been cloture, you know.” She fell silent.

“That didn’t answer my question.”

“It did, indirectly. If you want a precise answer, I have never been able to figure out exactly what the grays are here for, so it’s pretty hard for me to tell if they’re a danger. I mean, they look like aliens. God knows, they act like it. But I’ve seen the Bob autopsies. They’re partly biological and partly manufactured, and they have no brain as we know it. Just all those threads of glass in the head. But far, far fewer neurons than we have. So why do they think so well? We don’t know. And since we can’t say what they are, we also can’t assign motive. Those are my thoughts, anyway.”

He watched her. He didn’t know exactly what he was waiting for—perhaps for some mistake, the nature of which would only reveal itself when she made it. Potentially at least, this woman could play an important role. He had no doubt that the grays had maneuvered her very neatly out of Wilkes’s hands and into his, and he had understood that it was so that she could perform a function with the child.
Teaching
, he thought.

She asked him, “Listen, do you know anything about them? Like, where they’re from? I’ve always asked Adam about that but, you know, he doesn’t tell you much.”

She wasn’t afraid of him, and that was good. “We don’t know anything about where they’re from. We do know that there are a lot of them out there, and they’re on their way here.”

“So the DNA thing is true?”

“You know about that?”

She nodded. “Mike told me that they’ve used up their DNA and they want ours.”

“That’s part of it.”

“So this is the reconnaissance element of an invasion force and we should fear them.”

“I didn’t say that. I think they may also be our only chance of avoiding extinction.”

Her lovely mouth opened. The tip of her tongue, a soft, pink pearl, ran
along her lips and withdrew. “Are you—uh . . . no.” She shook her head. “Wow. That’s big.”

“The calculations are correct. There’s going to be a tremendous environmental breakdown. In fact, it’s been building for eons. We’re at the climax.”

She sat there, staring at him.

“Lauren?”

“What about babies?”

He shook his head. “Nobody makes it . . . except your friend Mike and his outfit. Have you ever heard of the Trust?”

“No.”

“The way they’ve got it set up, about a million people will survive, chosen by the Trust—Mike and his group.”

“But then the grays will get them. They’ll have gained nothing.”

“That’s not how it works. We have reason to believe—to know—that the grays will give up on us unless there are billions of us alive. Smaller numbers will be of no use to them. The reason that Adam left when he did is that something has come to crisis, and Adam is apparently involved. Man and the grays are both in danger of extinction, and they’re trying to save us all. Your boss and his friends are trying to prevent that so the grays will go away and leave the Earth to their million elite.”

He watched her thinking, saw the pain in her eyes, the shock . . . saw a young woman’s face reflect fear for children who had not yet been born. “What happens . . . if the grays get their way?”

“Lauren, a very long time ago, there was a war on this Earth. A great civilization fell. When it did, we lost our knowledge of how physics really works. We set off down a road of ignorance that’s led to where we are now: all six billion of us trapped on an overburdened and dying planet. Meantime, the grays are so ancient that they’ve used up their DNA. Without each other, both species go extinct. They’re looking for a sort of marriage: they get access to our youthful DNA, we get access to their brilliant minds. Everybody survives.”

“But how? What happens?”

“Lauren, it’s my growing belief that you are one of the most critical human beings now alive on this planet, because you are a big part of the answer to that question.”

Suddenly, she looked every inch the soldier. Her eyes flashed. Rob thought, as always, that the grays had chosen well. She would be able to do
this. He made his decision about her, after all these hours, in that split second. The grays had given her to him so she could be the child’s empath, it was the only explanation that made any sense. “You’ll be a sort of teacher, Lauren. An interpreter, if you will.”

“Of who? Of what?”

“I don’t want to be mysterious, but it’s best that we let this unfold in its own time.”

“That’s hard.”

“So be it, duty is duty. I have one further question. Do you know how to hide? I mean, on a trained, professional level?”

“Why in the world should I hide? Colonel Wilkes had no right to do what he did, you said that yourself. He’s up on charges.”