Authors: Connie Suttle
"That concerns me, too. Besides, the Joint Chiefs need taking down a notch or two over this. Whether the President will see the need for it is questionable."
"I believe Hal's clone may have advised her on this," Shaw jerked his head at the photographs on my tablet. "Therefore, he may have had a good guess as to where they'd be taken. I wonder if Madam President considered that."
"I think the CIA Director and the Joint Chiefs are so smug in their perceived invincibility, they may have advised her against moving these. Obviously, they thought them well-contained."
They had. Steel doors more than a foot thick, which had been ripped from their hinges, attested to that. "They're either on their own and can cause damage that way, or they're in the hands of the enemy, and we've all seen what he's capable of doing," Shaw said.
* * *
Corinne
"Cabbage, we're here." Rafe squeezed my hand to wake me.
"What? Oh." I'd been far away in my dreams and wasn't particularly pleased about waking in the extremely hot state of Nevada.
I blinked sleepily as I followed Rafe and the others off the plane, while our luggage was taken off the aircraft and loaded into three waiting SUVs.
"Cori, you look half asleep," James came to stand beside me while Auggie and Leo decided who was riding with whom. Rafe, Opal and I ended up with Auggie. Nick and Maye went with Leo; Jeff rode with James, Richard Farrell and Marcus.
I'd seen Marcus eyeing Opal-she was beautiful; an American Indian with long, black hair and dark eyes. I caught her eyeing him a couple of times, too, and I wouldn't want to be Marcus if he attempted to touch her without permission.
Just the thought of it made me smile.
"What?" she turned a lovely smile on me.
"Oh, just thinking about Marcus and how much trouble he might be in if he doesn't keep his hands to himself," I said.
That made her laugh. "You're right," she said. I knew without a doubt that Opal had no yearnings toward Marcus, and hoped he didn't learn the hard way just how dangerous she could be.
"We don't have much information on you," she said. "I saw dossiers on everyone else in the Program, with permission from the President." I could almost hear Auggie and Rafe's ears perking up at Opal's question. "The President said she wouldn't give your information to anyone-that you could tell us or not."
"I almost died in the terrorist attack on the Louvre," I shrugged. "The drug kept me alive."
"You were there?" Her dark eyes widened at the idea that someone actually survived.
"It's a long story," I said. "Do we have water in the car, Auggie?" He'd let Rafe drive and was sitting up front with him.
"Some in the cargo area-they sent a cooler," Auggie said.
"Okay." Unbuckling my seat belt, I reached over the seat to open the cooler. The minute I put my hand on one of the bottles I knew.
Don't drink any of the water
, I sent to everyone in our party.
It's laced with ricin
, I added.
Auggie's cell phone rang immediately. "James drank some of the water," Jeff reported.
"Pull over. Honey, pull over," I was terrified in an instant.
Dr. Farrell was already using the ability he had to heal James when we pulled over to the side of the road. I jumped from the SUV and ran back to James' vehicle. Richard's hands were on James' chest while he sent power coursing through James' body to reverse the poison's effects.
I placed my hands on James' chest, too, only it was my goal to neutralize the poison. Richard felt my presence and turned to blink at me, astonished by what I was doing. He could feel it in his hands-that the poison was changing composition to something that wouldn't harm anyone.
"Cori? Will I be okay?" James' voice wobbled when my work was done and I removed my hands.
"Honey, you are one hundred percent okay now," I said. "You wait till I find whoever put that shit in your water, though. They have a big surprise coming, and it won't be a good one, either."
"I'm with her," Richard pulled away and nodded in my direction. "Colonel Hunter, how long is our drive from here?" He turned to Auggie.
"It's less than an hour away," Auggie said, blinking in the bright sunlight that bore down on us.
"Is everybody on the same page-don't drink the water?" Dr. Farrell asked. Everybody nodded. "Good. Whoever did this wanted to thin the herd. We're not going to let that happen."
"I order it not to happen," Auggie said. I could tell he was pissed-we could have lost James and nobody would be happy about that.
"Can I ride with you?" James reached out to touch my arm.
"Honey, you can do whatever you want right now," I said.
"Good." He climbed out of the back seat of Jeff's SUV and put his arms around me.
Honey, I know that was scary
, I sent to him.
You're okay. Dr. Farrell and I wouldn't let anything happen to you
.
"I'm glad you checked the water," James said as I pulled him toward Auggie's SUV.
"That makes two of us," I confirmed.
* * *
Not far from Devil's Hole Road, just outside the triangle it forms in one area, lies an underground facility owned by the U.S. Government. Its entrance is hidden beneath an old, tin-roofed barn, sitting next to an old ranch house, its exterior hiding the more modern facility located inside. Fences, with
Private Property, trespassers will be introduced to our guns and dogs
signs hanging everywhere, greeted us as we drove across a cattle guard and onto the property.
"Why the hell do they need a cattle guard?" Opal asked as our SUV bounced across it, the tires clunking over metal pipes and shaking the vehicle annoyingly. There certainly weren't any cattle anywhere-it was desert, with nothing for a cow to eat until you reached parts of California.
"It's wired-it tells them we're coming, and if they weren't expecting us, our tires would have been cut and guards would have shot at us," Auggie said.
"Good news all around," Opal muttered. I laughed.
Ten minutes later, we parked in the barn, where nothing around us resembled the inside of a barn. A modernized metal building surrounded us, while the heavy, steel doors leading into the hidden facility were undergoing repairs-two welders were outside working on them. This was the survivors' final point of escape, looked like.
"I'm not detecting much scent," Nick walked about the interior of the barn, sniffing.
"There probably isn't much to detect," I sighed. "Auggie, one of them knew how to shield, I think, so they wouldn't leave that kind of a trail. It's anybody's guess how they got away, once they were outside this barn."
The facility director chose that moment to appear. He walked up to Auggie and held out his hand. "Pete Dumont," he introduced himself. "I wish I could welcome you under better circumstances, Mr. Secretary."
Pete Dumont had thick, reddish-brown hair that refused to allow any comb to tame it. Streaks of silver ran through the mess of it, indicating that Pete was in his mid-fifties. His green eyes begged Auggie to be friendly, if not nice. Pete felt personally responsible for the escape of sixteen no-longer-human detainees.
"I hope you have images and information on what it is, exactly, we're supposed to track," Auggie gruffed.
"I do," Pete said. "I'm sorry you didn't have this information before, but I was ordered not to reveal it until now."
That meant, in English, that CIA Director Merle Askins ordered it. He'd been placed by Madam President's predecessor, which automatically rendered him suspect in my eyes. Plus, he was a conniving bastard. Everybody said so, just not to his face.
It meant, too, that Merle was likely hiding a ton of excrement from Madam President. Yeah, that pissed me off. You can't ask questions about things you don't even realize exist.
"Merle Askins strikes again," Opal whispered beside me as Pete turned to lead us into the facility.
"You got that right," I whispered back.
* * *
"Cori," Auggie handed a fistful of photographs to me after he looked at them closely. Pete stood nearby, sweating as Auggie, wearing his Secretary of Defense hat, swore at the images before handing some of them to me, first.
Rafe sat on one side, Opal on the other, so all three of us looked at what sixteen humans had become after surviving the drug.
"The youngest one is the most dangerous, I think," Pete sighed. "As a human, he was nineteen. Here's his photograph, before and after."
Auggie looked, shook his head and handed it to me. Rafe drew in a breath beside me. In one photograph, Kevin Riley smiled as his senior class photo was taken. In the other, the creature that formerly was Kevin Riley stood over the carcass of a disemboweled cow. His muzzle, if you could call it that, was bloody from eating the animal from the middle outward.
Sharp, obsidian scales covered his body, while his eyes glowed golden as he fed. Claws on all six legs were evident, although he only employed the first two to feed himself.
"I believe that's a carryover from his human existence, only using his front set of legs to hold his lunch," I handed the photograph to Rafe. I was more than done looking at it and the next one of him, which showed him holding the cow like most humans would hold a chicken leg.
That's how large he'd become; that a cow-in proportion, anyway-could be eaten like a chicken leg.
"He liked showers after eating, so we let the fire sprinklers clean him and the blood up at the same time," Pete muttered.
"Cori, can you tell us what that is?" Auggie asked as Rafe passed the photograph to Nick and Maye.
"I know you're familiar with the dinosaurs in Earth's history," I sighed.
"That's no dinosaur I've ever seen," Pete protested.
"It isn't, because you didn't grow up on a world a thousand light years from here," I said.
Corinne
I was forced into a semi-private meeting with Auggie after our meeting with Pete ended. Only Auggie, Leo and Dr. Farrell were allowed into this meeting. The Program was about to be blown wide open, and I wished that Rafe could be beside me while I explained what I'd known for a while.
"What did you mean when you mentioned a world a thousand light years from here?" Auggie began. I could tell his blood pressure was about to rise dramatically if he didn't get a quick answer.
"It's what the Program-and Cloud Dust is all about," I said. "We didn't manufacture it here."
I watched Richard Farrell's face as he turned it away from me. He suspected, he just didn't have enough evidence to make a conjecture. Good scientist that he was, he wasn't about to make a wild claim without substantiation.
"Where, then? Russia?" Leo Shaw asked. He still wasn't getting it.
"Oh, they have it too, just from separate incidents. I will say that they've taken its uses to the extreme, though."
"Corinne, stop talking in circles and explain this. Now." Auggie thumped his fist on the table, making Richard jump.
We'd been allowed into a private meeting room inside the underground facility, and I'd already taken care of the bugs planted there before saying anything.
"The original drug, which looks like dust to anybody who doesn't know, by the way, came from extraterrestrials. We got it once-in 1947. The Russians got it twice, in 1969 and 1986."
"Reported crashes," Richard mumbled while he stood and raked fingers through his hair.
"How does it work, then? Why was it there? Do you have any ideas?" Auggie asked. I could see that he struggled with the information, just as the others did.
"Have you ever wondered how someone from so far away might live long enough to reach Earth, if they didn't have a faster-than-light drive on their space ship?" I asked.
"Not really," Leo shook his head. Auggie just stared-he was attempting to piece this puzzle together.
"They had the drug," I hunched my shoulders. "It's called Cloud Dust because it looks like dust and it-and the spaceship-came from the clouds above us. I figure that when the pilot or pilots got to the end of their lives, they'd take the drug and have another life to live. The problem with all this, of course, is that it was engineered for their race. If another race gets it, interesting things happen."
"Oh, my God," Auggie covered his face with both hands.
"You're telling us that this is instant reincarnation, or as close as you can get to it?" Richard asked, turning worried eyes in my direction.
"Yeah. Only sometimes, that reincarnation should have happened on another world. In a different atmosphere, maybe. Or under water. Who knows? The ones who die? It's because they're reborn in the wrong place."
"Holy Christ," Leo breathed.
"What about the clones?" Farrell asked. "Can you explain that?"
"I think that was an accidental discovery," I said. "People-lots of people-have the same blood types. Take Becker, for example. Somebody with the same blood type, getting Becker's dust-infected blood, will become exactly like Becker. It's like a copy machine, regularly spitting out identical images, it just has to pass from an original survivor of the drug. The recipient's blood recognizes the same blood, and then the drug takes over. It can happen in a matter of weeks, as you've already seen."
"And blood can be kept frozen for a lengthy period of time," Richard nodded. "If the enemy loses one servant, as long as he has their blood, he can make as many copies as he wants."
"I don't want to imagine an army of Beckers," Auggie said.
"I'm hoping we killed off the last of him," I shrugged. I didn't want to tell them the other things I knew-Armageddon could come soon enough, and from more than one direction.
* * *
"They know, now?" Rafe asked as I walked into the room where he and the others waited for me. Auggie, Leo and Richard had gone off to have a phone conversation with Madam President. I didn't envy them.
"Yeah. As much as they need, anyway," I said.
"You know something?" Maye asked.
Yes, but we can't discuss it here-there are bugs and unfriendly employees
, I replied to Maye's question.
No surprise
, she sent and nodded at me. Too bad for Merle Askins that he couldn't bug mindspeech. We could call him a bow-legged twat in mindspeech and he'd never know it.
Why are you smiling?
Maye's eyes narrowed as she watched the corners of my mouth curl.
I just called Merle a bow-legged twat in my head
, I returned.
Maye started laughing.
"What's going on?" Opal asked, her dark, unblinking eyes studying me.
I called Merle Askins a bow-legged twat
, I sent to her and the others.
Nick slapped a hand over his mouth before the guffaw could escape.
* * *
Notes-Colonel Hunter
The call took place outside, far from any bugs. I hoped that someone, somewhere, wasn't bugging my phone while I spoke with the President.
"That's what Corinne said?" Madam President asked. She wanted to believe Corinne, who'd never lied to us yet, but the news was so far-fetched as to fall in the realm of pure speculation.
"It's what she said. It makes sense, I suppose, but I still can't wrap my head around it."
"And Dr. Farrell thinks it's plausible?"
"Hell, Corinne just confirmed his suspicions," I replied. "According to him, everything went back to that time, and he'd done enough research to know that the scientists initially working on the drug were stationed in the Southwest. If I'm right, that's when this bunker was built. It's been upgraded all along, but the original building dates back to the late forties."
"That's true," Madam President sighed and went silent for a moment. "If the Russians have the same thing, and they've done all this," she hesitated again. "Damn. This is outrageous. I can't believe my predecessor put so many lives in danger."
"Do you think he'd gotten wind of the experiments going on in Russia? Did he think he needed his own army to combat what they were building?" I asked. "Rafe didn't know about this, but Baikov likely did," I added.
"Does this mean that the enemy, whoever he is, may have come from those experiments? Could he be Russian?" she asked. "This President hasn't been in power very long, but he seems bent on following in his predecessor's footsteps. I hoped things would be different after the last one died, but that wasn't to be."
"No idea about a Russian connection, but we'll start looking at likely candidates," I promised.
"You still have sixteen survivors to track," she reminded me.
"I know, but that trail may lead to the same place and the same person," I pointed out. "If he took them, after getting them out, somehow, we may be in a world of trouble. Did you see the photographs of that giant, well, whatever it was? Corinne says it's a dinosaur of sorts from another planet."
"This is a nightmare," the President mumbled. "And it happened on our watch."
"I like to think that we're where we are, because we're the right people for the job," I said.
"I sure hope you're right, because you know what might happen if you're not."
"Let's not think about that for the moment. We have a job to do, and I need to get my people on it ASAP."
* * *
Corinne
"Cori, where do you think we ought to start looking for that thing-and the others with it?" James flopped onto the uncomfortable sofa beside me. No furniture inside the bunker looked as if it were begging to be lounged on while reading a book.
Leo Shaw had taken charge of the bottled water from our vehicles, and ordered the lab inside the facility to analyze it for the poison it contained and look for fingerprints or residue. That made me happy and kept Pete's employees occupied at the same time.
The only records we had concerning the water were of the delivery made by the vendors who supplied Nellis AFB, where we'd picked up the vehicles. James had worked on tracking down their suppliers before they'd gotten the cases of water, and ordered all deliveries picked up so they could be examined for contamination.
Auggie didn't want word of the poison leaked if he could help it, and worried that we'd been targeted specifically by someone wanting all of us dead. It was a valid thought, and one I considered exploring.
The other thing that came to my mind was this-were they testing us? Testing me, perhaps, just to see if I'd find it before anybody died?
For the moment, Auggie wanted information on James' poisoning to remain with us, and everybody we'd had contact with would be watched carefully. He depended on me for that, knowing I'd see it in them if they were guilty.
I considered letting Rafe, Nick or Maye know first, because they wanted a few pieces of the one responsible and I wasn't about to stop them. Auggie, Leo and Richard walked in together.
"Cori, is there anything to find here?" Auggie asked.
"No," I shook my head. "There's no trail to follow and wherever they are, something is hiding them. They won't find anything helpful on the water, either, except that it contains ricin, which we already knew. Dinosaur Boy and his entourage could be far away by now."
"Something that large can't be transported in a normal vehicle," Rafe pointed out. "The others, yes. The dinosaur creature? Absolutely not."
"Let's go back to Vegas; I'll send messages on the way, asking about any unusually large trucks traveling through the state around the time of the escape," Auggie said. "We have other problems to solve, too, and we need to get on that before suspects disappear."
He wanted whoever attempted to poison us-bad.
* * *
James rode back to Vegas with Rafe, Auggie, Opal and me. "Do you think we'll find that thing?" Opal asked along the way.
"I hope so," I said. "At this point, I'm not sure he remembers much about who he was before, because the animal is taking over."
"I'm supposed to have records e-mailed to me on all of them," Auggie said, peering around his front seat. "We didn't see all the photographs, or hear everything," he added.
"I know," I nodded. "I think they were afraid of us. Somebody told them what was coming to inspect their facility."
"You mean who, don't you?"
"That's not what I read," I replied. "Several of them thought their lives might be in danger, because there was a killer among us."
"Were they talking about me?" Rafe asked. He was driving, so he didn't turn to look.
"No, honey. They were thinking about me."
"Who the fuck told them that?" Auggie exploded. "They shouldn't have information on any of us."
"You know, I think I'd like to know the same thing," I said. "What I do know is this-they'd gotten an anonymous e-mail from somebody, telling them I could kill with a look. No description, so they had a hard time figuring out whether it was me, Opal or Maye, but they knew it was a woman."
"So they didn't know where the message originated?"
"No," I shook my head at Auggie. "But I intend to find out."
"This complicates things. I hope they think it's a lie, now, since nobody died back there."
"That's not exactly true," I said. "Not now, anyway."
"What the hell?" Auggie snapped.
"One of them knew what was happening. I didn't kill him. The creature he had locked in a closet did it when he opened the door to release it. It's dead, too, by the way-the others shot and killed it before it got away."
"I may kill somebody before the day's over," Auggie growled.
* * *
"So only fifteen are left?" Leo asked when we settled in Auggie's suite at a high-rise in Vegas. "Did you know about the one left behind, Corinne?"
"I did, but the guy intended to let it loose on us if we said we suspected as much. This way, he's dead and it's dead. There are fifteen others."
"He wanted it to kill us if we pointed a finger in his direction?" Auggie shook his head.
"That was the plan. He was the inside man, letting Dinosaur Boy know that somebody was waiting on the outside to give him anything he wanted, including a nice, new home, if he'd agree to scare the bejeezus out of people and devour a few, now and then. I think he liked that idea, so one was chosen to stay behind to protect the mole while the rest followed Dinosaur Boy out the door."
"Did the mole know where they were going?"
"He had no idea, but I figure you'll find the fat bank account he left behind-if you get to it fast enough."
"Fuck," Auggie cursed and went to stand by the floor-to-ceiling windows of his suite. Las Vegas was beginning to light up around us, but the noise of the streets didn't reach that high. I was grateful. I had enough worries and honking horns, engine noise and screeching tires would likely wear on my nerves. Opal was the one to contact Matt Michaels, who turned his attention to the dead man's bank deposits.