Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 02 (24 page)

«Wrong, Kyi-can,»Coyote heard the Yidam’s voice in his mind,« Isee in the ultraviolet range.»

Fingers tangled themselves in his hair, jerking his head back, and an invisible fist pounded him into unconsciousness.

Uncomfortably wet and stiff, Coyote awakened staring up at the night sky over Tibet. Back between his feet he sawthe heavily guarded East Gate, but none of the monks at the far end of the causeway paid him any attention.

They stared out beyond him, chanting as always.

Pain centered itself in his nose, and he immediately knew it had been broken. Licking his lips, he tasted blood.

He pulled himself up into a sitting position, resting his back against the
Dukhang
wall, and waited until the wave of dizziness passed. Resting his elbows on his knees, he

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

cradled his head in his hands.

It makes no sense.He assumed the creature he had fought in the training room was the same one who used the
naginata
todestroy the gorfash. The first time he met it, the Yidam tried to kill him, but the second time it saved his life. The third time it sought him and tried to kill him, but then didn’t do the job when it had the chance in Night.

No sense at all.

Coyote slowly stood and turned to lean on the wall.

Looking up, he saw the Yidam’s image staring down at him.

Coyote shook his head. “You mock me because you’re in control, but you should not take refuge in that idea.

Things change, and I change. Fiddleback thought he controlled me, and you, like him, will learn how dangerous I can be when the tables are turned.”

Given Kip’s apprehension about the Galactic Brotherhood Institute, Sin had not been sure what to expect when he accepted a recruiter’s invitation to attend a Friday night seminar offered by Arrigo El-Leichter. Over the phone, the woman had made it sound as innocent as a lecture about a trip to some exotic locale, but the talk’s title, “The Secret Masters of Your Life,” came across as far more sinister.

Things were slated to start at 7:30 p.m., so Sin arrived 15 minutes early on the off chance he would get a chance to take a look around the institute. According to the map he had of Kimpunshima, the Galbro Complex occupied as much space as a small multinational corporation could be expected to use, though its percentage of residential to operational facilities approached those of a service organization. Galbro did have access to the docks on the underside of the artificial island and maintained a hangar at the Level Two airport on the island’s south end.

Early arrivals for lectures were expected and greeted by two smiling, uniformed women. Both struck Sin as a bit vacuous and even incongruous because, while he was used to being greeted at the door in Japan, the greeters
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

were seldom Aryan types like these two. They directed him across a large, inlaid marble foyer to a built-in booth where another Nordic type was checking a list and handing out name tags.

“Welcome to GBI. How may I help you?” Standing in a booth filled with books, videos, CDs, cassettes and post-ers, the blond man look as wholesome and clean cut as an ad for virtue.

Sin gave him an innocent smile. “I registered for this evening’s lecture. I am Sinclair MacNeal.”

The blue-eyed young man studied the printout on his clipboard, then smiled and checked a name off the list. He looked over at several rows of name tags, then plucked one from the center of a line. “Sinclair K. MacNeal, here you are.” He pointed off to his left and toward a set of double-doors. “Go in and take a seat. Try to get near the front so you can see Mr. El-Leichter better.”

“Thank you.” Sin took the tag and pinned it to his jacket’s breast pocket. Following the man’s directions, he walked into a huge auditorium and headed directly for the tiny phalanx of folding chairs arranged at the far end near a podium. The room itself had the look of a gymnasium, but Sin saw no court lines painted on the parquet floor, nor any basketball backboards hanging on the walls. Instead, numerous tapestries, quilts and huge paintings decorated the room, with all of them sharing a “Visitors from the Stars” motif.

Sin thought most of them laughably amateur in execution. This surprised him, because he already knew GBI was highly sophisticated, as evidenced by his name tag. He had arranged with Lilith to have his file modified to change his middle initial every three hours.

Their providing him with name tag that used a “K” as his middle initial meant they had accessed his file 33

to 36 hours after their recruiter made contact. Given the level of security consciousness Lorica Industries had shown, it meant GBI had excellent computer crackers or a plant inside Lorica Japan.

The only reason to have these things up here is to put us at ease and to use as contrast later. Looking at these things, I would hardly think aliens the sort of folks who would destroy Kip’s boat or be running secret missions.

This should be interesting, if nothing else.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Sin found himself a seat in the third row, over on the right edge. Up behind the podium he saw a huge banner of a white, polar-coordinate grid on a light blue background — about the same shade of blue as the United Nations flag, it seemed to him. Superimposed on the white web he saw stars arrayed in the familiar Big Dipper constellation, with the North Star hanging there above the whole circle. Beneath the whole design, in all capital letters, he read “THE GALACTIC BROTHERHOOD WELCOMES YOU.”

Below the painting stood two sets of doors, one on either side of the podium. The one nearest him, to the right of center, looked like utterly unremarkable fire doors, complete with a glowing red exit sign overthem. The other door, on the left, had a touch-sensitive scanning plate next to it. It looked to Sin very much like the one in the top of the Lorica Tower in Phoenix. He devoted a certain amount of his attention to that door and resolved, at some point, to get past it and into whatever GBI had gone to such pains to protect.

The room quickly filled, and Sin found himself doomed to spend the lecture next to a rather dapper man who had saturated himself with cologne. That man, in turn, let everyone else around him know that he was attending this lecture for the fifth time and that “you will learn things here that you never even dreamt could be possible.” He smiled at Sin and added, “We all have our little secrets here, don’t we?”

“Sure,” Sin laughed. “I’m an agent in the employ of Japanese government who’s come to infiltrate this whole operation.”

The perfume man did not take the joke well, but the others around him laughed, and that silenced him. Overhead air conditioning units hummed to life, and the breeze they created succeeded in blowing the cologne stench away for the most part.
Things are looking up.
The lights slowly dimmed.
It’s showtime.

Wall-mounted loudspeakers crackled. “Ladies and gentlebeings, it is the Galactic Brotherhood Institute’s distinct pleasure to present to you tonight’s featured speaker: Arrigo El-Leichter.”

Everything faded to blackness for a second, then a platinum spotlight encircled the security door behind the
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

podium dais. The door itself clicked, then opened slowly with a white vapor leaking out around its edges. As the smoke drained away, it revealed a figure of a man.

Tall and slender, his face had a sharp, angular bone structure and a straight, slender nose. His thick blond hair had been combed back to emphasize his broad forehead and widow’s peak, yet was piled high to show off its natural wave and thickness. Despite not having a massive, muscular body, when he moved forward, Sin had no doubt the charismatic man was physically powerful and mentally sharp. His piercing blue gaze swept across the audience, reflecting the light of the spot back on them.

He wore a custom tailored suit of white that bridged the gap between a military uniform and something that might be a fashion rage in the near future. The jacket, which was cut to his waist, featured a double-breast with lapels flared on either side looking almost like wings. The slight flare to the legs of his slacks allowed him to wear white boots without having to tuck the pants into them.

Arrigo El-Leichter strode to the dais and mounted it in one easy step. As he took his place behind the podium, the spotlight dimmed and the house lights came up a bit.

Track lights on the ceiling illuminated the Galactic Brotherhood banner, and a vent somewhere shunted enough air at it to make it wave slightly.

Arrigo raised his right fist to thump his left breast, then extended it upward and out in a salute mimicked by some members of the audience. “I bring you greetings and best wishes from the Galactic Brotherhood Institute. Those of you who are with us for the first time might not know it, but we were formed three decades ago to help all mankind realize the unity of their creation and to help them attain their rightful place in the galaxy.”

Sin felt the room’s tension build as uninitiated folks like him began to wonder what they were doing there, but Arrigo drained it off with a smile. “You have probably heard many things about us and our work here—many wild and wondrous and even
crazy
stories about what we do and who we are.” He laughed lightly, and the audience joined in. “Well, I will leave it to you to judge, after this evening, if any of those things are true. All I ask of you, right here and now, is to open your minds, and try to put aside your preconceptions. Don’t ask yourself if what I will share with you is true or false, but ask yourself if it
could
be true, then judge from there what action you should
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

take.”

Sin smiled. The man’s request sounded reasonable on the surface of it, but Sin saw the logical trap. He knew that if he were to accept as
possible
what the man said, then act on that possibility, he could be talked into anything.

Arrigo was asking him to disable his decision-making faculties, then suggesting he could make a decision based on whatever he had left.

“The story I am going to tell you is going to sound strange and perhaps even disjointed. It is, in fact, far more complex than I am able to present here, and researching every facet of it is the main work of our organization. Rest assured that I would not offer any of these facts to you had not extensive and exhaustive studies been done of them.”

The Galbro leader leaned heavily on the edges of the oak podium. “Over 60 years ago, on July 2, 1947, a spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin crashed during a thunderstorm on a farm outside Corona, New Mexico, in the United States. This has popularly been referred to as the ‘Roswell Incident,’ though ittook place nearly 80 miles from that city. From the crash were recovered four EBEs—extraterrestrial biological entities—three of which died in the crash. The fourth remained alive and even recovered from his injuries. His name was Krlll.

“Krlll served as a liaison between the United States government and his people, a spacefaring race we know as the ‘Grays.’ The Grays were, at the time of the crash, involved in a program of human kidnapping and animal mutilation. They managed to hide evidence of this from the United States government and, in return for aid in developing high-technology devices like antigravity spaceships, entered into an alliance with the United States and her allies. They later concluded a similar agreement with the Soviets and, by the time President Kennedy challenged America to put a man on the moon, the Grays, in conjunction with the CIA and KGB, already had an operational moonbase called Luna in place.”

Sin frowned. Man’s race to the moon had taken place well before his birth, but he’d studied it avidly as he grew up. He’d also read enough about UFOs to recognize the reference to the Corona crash, but all of that had been explained away as a downed weather balloon.
This is nuts.

Arrigo went on, keeping his voice low and sincere. “The Grays, to this day, continue their predation on mankind.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

They steal our people and use them for genetics experiments. Under terms of their agreement with the govern-ments of the world, they built a number of underground bases, and the Grays use them to clone themselves and make hybrid Gray humans. You have heard of them from the few that have escaped. In some places in the United States, these forlorn individuals have become bogeymen, known variously as Gray devils or Gray-man or Grimmands.

“Through the alliance and agreements made in it, the Grays have succeeded in implanting one in 40 humans with tiny devices that, at an appointed time, will react to a signal and turn the afflicted into an army of zombies that will destroy the world as we know it. Those of you who have awakened with blood on your pillow from what you thought was a nocturnal nosebleed could well have been plucked from the safety of your bed and unwittingly turned into an implantee against your will!”