I slowed the car, and concentrated on getting home in one piece.
Deer were bound to dash out at me, and I wasn’t in any shape for sudden-death decisions.
I saw something strange, a streaking white flash in the woods to my right.
I gently applied the brake. Slowed down some more. Peered hard into the shifting shadows of the woods.
I hoped I was wrong, but the white flash looked like a young girl running. A little girl had no business out here in the middle
of the night.
I braked to a full stop. If the young girl was lost, I could certainly give her a ride to her home. I felt something was wrong,
though. Maybe she was being chased by someone? Or she might be lost?
I left the engine running and got out of the Suburban. The ground fog lifted some, so I walked a few yards into the woodland.
My skin was prickling with apprehension.
Stop.
Look.
Listen.
“Hello,” I called in a soft, tentative voice. “Who’s out there? I’m Frannie O’Neill. Dr. O’Neill. The vet from town?”
Then I saw the white streak again, this time darting from behind a tall, blue-green spruce. I scrutinized, looked closely,
concentrated, squinted fiercely.
It wasayoung girl, yes!
She looked to be about eleven or twelve, with long blond hair and a loose-fitting dress. The dress was ripped and stained.
Was she all right? She didn’t look it from where I stood.
She’d heard me, seen me, she must have. The girl started to run away. She seemed afraid, in some kind of trouble. I couldn’t
see her very well. The fog had returned in ragged shreds.
“Wait!” I called out. “You shouldn’t be out here by yourself. What are you doing? Please, wait.”
She didn’t wait. She actually sped up, tripped over a log, went down on one knee. She shouted something that I couldn’t make
out from where I was standing.
My heart started to beat faster. Something wasn’t right about this. I began to run toward her. I thought she might be hurt.
Or maybe she was high on something? That made some sense to me. Maybe she was older than she looked from a distance. It was
hard to tell through the scarves of fog.
There was only the dimmest light from a thin slice of moon, so it was hard to tell, but it looked to me that her proportions
were a little odd. Her arms were sheathed with something.
I stopped running. Hard! My heart started to thunder. I could hear it.
It couldn’t be.
Of course it couldn’t be.
I almost screamed. I gasped for breath, steadied myself against a tall spruce.
The little girl appeared to have white and silver wings.
W
HAT I SAW was way beyond my abilities to imagine, beyond my comprehension, my system of belief, and maybe beyond my ability
to communicate it right now. The little girl’s arms were folded back in a peculiar way, but when she lifted them—feathers
fanned out.
It wasn’t humanly possible, but there she was—
a girl with wings!
Spots jumped in front of my eyes. Colors, coruscating reds and yellows, danced. I was definitely a little high from the Crown
Royal, but I wasn’t drunk. Or was I very drunk? Was I so freaked out by Frank McDonough’s death that I was hallucinating?
Close your eyes, Frannie.
Now open them again, slowly
…
She was still there! No more than twenty yards away. The girl was watching me, too.
Don’t faint, Frannie. DON’T YOU DARE, I told myself.
Go slow. Go really slow here. Don’t make any sudden noise or movement to scare her off.
I watched as the girl awkwardly found her feet. One wing was folded neatly behind her. The other wing dragged a little. Was
she hurt?
“Hey,” I called again, softly. “It’s all right.”
The young blond girl turned toward me. I guess she was close to five feet tall. She gave me a fierce look with her large,
wide-spaced eyes. I stood in the ferny glade in the milky moonlight. Everything around me was shifting shadows. I watched,
dizzy and panting, not knowing who was more frightened, her or me.
She shot me a grim look of horror and ran away again, into the night, farther into the woods surrounding Fourth of July Road
until she was just a blur.
I followed until it was too dark to see in the dense woods. I finally leaned against a tree and tried to review the last few
minutes. I couldn’t do it. My head was spinning too fast.
Somehow I managed to get back to the Suburban. I climbed inside and sat there in the dark.
“I did not just see a young girl with wings,” I whispered out loud.
I couldn’t have.
But I was sure that I had.
When I could manage to drive, I went to the police station in nearby Clayton, a burg of about three thousand. Actually, the
station is an outpost for the main office in Nederland. I stopped the Suburban on Miller Street, less than a block from the
station house.
I desperately wanted to continue down the peaceful village street, but I couldn’t do it, couldn’t make myself.
I
had
been drinking… and driving. It was already past two in the morning, way past the witching hour in Clayton.
Now that I wasn’t actually
looking
at the girl… I wasn’t completely sure what I had seen. I just couldn’t tell my story to the local cops. Not that night, anyway.
Maybe tomorrow.
I went home to sleep on it—or more likely, to sleep it off.
K
IT WAS SWEATING, just like he had on the American Airlines flight from Boston. Damn it, he still couldn’t fly very well. But
he had to.
The pilot of the Bell helicopter shot a look across the cockpit at him. He didn’t bother to conceal a smirk. “You okay? Never
been up in one of these eggbeaters, huh? You don’t look so good, Mr. Harrison. Maybe we should head back?”
Kit almost lost his cool with the guy. The pilot was an asshole of the first order. Actually, he’d flown in plenty of helicopters
before, flown in snow-blind blizzards, bad rainstorms, and on dangerous raids. There had never been a problem until August
of ’94.
He’d been a good agent until then, one of the best. Resourceful, bright, hardworking, tough enough. It was a matter of record
in his personnel file. So what the hell had happened to him?
“The natural color of my gills is green. I’m just fine. I’m all right.” He tried a little self-deprecating humor.
“Whatever you say, Kermit. It’s your dime.”
Yes, it sure was his dime, and he didn’t have a lot of them to blow on costly surveillance junkets like this. But he felt
he needed an overview; he had to see the big picture; take in the lay of the land. And the
real
big picture here had to do with subjects as lofty and important as the survival of the human race. He believed that, or he
wouldn’t be out here on his own.
Kit tried looking down at the treetops again. Acres of ponderosa pines with aspen groves nestled in. Occasional “blowouts”—stacks
of trees blown down in winter. And, of course, the snowy peaks of the Continental Divide.
There was a lab out here somewhere near the Divide. Kit knew that much. Where the hell could it be?
The helicopter passed over Gross Reservoir. Then he could see the Eldora ski area, and the small town of Nederland. Then another
picturesque reservoir—probably Barker, if he was reading the maps correctly. Off in the distance, he spotted Flagstaff Mountain.
Closer in was Magnolia Road, Sunshine Canyon.
He knew what he was looking for… the end of civilization as we know it. A brave new world. That’s all. It was out here somewhere.
He thought about Dr. Frank McDonough again. Dr. Mc-Donough had been on his list. McDonough, and also David Mekin and his wife.
He had wanted to meet with Dr. McDonough—a pediatrician with a background in embryology.
Unfortunately, he’d been a day late getting here. Blame his boss, Peter Stricker, for that. Hell no, blame himself.
Dr. McDonough was victim number four. Four doctors had been murdered that he knew of. Four doctors with suspicious pasts,
dubious presents, and now, no futures at all.
He watched a couple of paragliders off in the distance. They almost seemed to be flying. They looked so free.
“Okay, let’s go down,” he finally said to the rent-a-chopper pilot. He had his overview, anyway; he had the lay of the land.
It was the right first step for the investigation.
The pilot grinned and gave Kit a thumbs-down signal. What a jerk. “Hang on to your insides… Kermit.”
F-you, Sky King,
Kit thought. He didn’t say anything, didn’t want to start a scene up here. Especially not up here.
The helicopter swooped and went into a steep dive. He knew it was a physical impossibility, but his stomach seemed to drop
before the rest of the chopper and its contents.
He was feeling unsatisfied and uptight as he left the tiny “High Pines” Airport at around ten-thirty in the morning. He needed
help, but knew he couldn’t ask for it from the Bureau. He was on his own, and that really sucked.
H
AVE FAITH AND pursue the unknown end.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said it and Kit had always believed it. He still did, so here he was in the Rocky Mountains. Pursuing
the unknown end, and trying like hell to keep the faith.
He needed answers, or maybe he just wanted to hear a familiar voice. He called Peter Stricker’s office in Washington. This
was going to be tricky, but he thought he could pull it off. He might just be able to get a little help from the Bureau.
Peter Stricker was in charge of the Northeast sector of the FBI. They were still pretty good friends. Up until two and a half
years ago, Peter had actually worked for him.
Then Kit’s world turned upside down, and he wound up working for Peter. And last week, Peter had threatened to can him if
he didn’t make his job priorities the same as the ones the Bureau had for him. And Peter had put the warning
on paper.
Even before the official threat there had been signs. He’d been passed over for promotion after the accident in ’94—though
God only knows if that was the reason. More likely, it was his stubbornness and insubordination that had stalled out his career
in the FBI. Also, his obsessiveness with cases that fascinated or scared the living shit out of him. Like this case that had
brought him out to Colorado. He could see potential leads, looming problems, possible solutions where others didn’t.
He had always been an “unusual” FBI agent. Hell, that was why they
said
they had recruited him out of NYU Law. During his interviews he’d been told that the Bureau wanted him
because
they were too straitlaced and traditional, and therefore too predictable. He was supposed to represent a new, evolved kind
of agent. And he sure had! For a while, anyway.
They had sold hard on the idea of breaking out of the envelope, working outside the box; but once he was inside the organization,
he discovered that the FBI really didn’t want to change very much. Actually, the Bureau had tried to change him. And when
he wouldn’t budge, they resented the hell out of it. One of his superiors said, “We didn’t join you, Tom. You joined us. So
why don’t you cut the prima donna horseshit and get with the program like the rest of us?”
Because he was different. He was
supposed
to be different. That was the deal—and a deal was a deal.
Except that the Bureau wasn’t keeping their end.
They resented the corduroy sports jackets, unlogoed ball caps, the jeans, the dock shoes he insisted on wearing to work, and
not just on Fridays. And that he read “serious” novels like
Underworld
and
Mason & Dixon
and anything Toni Morrison wrote. And that some days he rode his Cannondale racing bike to and from the office in Boston.
They were bugged by his longish hair and his every-other-day shaving habits and his slight swagger, which didn’t represent
cockiness, just the fact that he liked to walk around with music playing in his head.
Most of all, though, the Bureau was incensed by his casual approach to discipline. Right from the start, he was called a loose
cannon.
Worse, he probably
was
a loose cannon. He’d been one as a gritty middleweight in the Boston Golden Gloves, and as an outspoken, and pretty unconventional
undergraduate at Holy Cross, and even at NYU Law. Hell, he was a bus driver’s son, one of five sons. He had no business being
at NYU Law, or maybe even at Cross. Why shouldn’t he speak his mind?
He’d gotten away with it in school, but not at the Federal Bureau. No loose cannons were permitted in the FBI. Not even ones
who had solved at least two “unsolvable” murder cases during the past five years.
Awhh, stop the horseshit, he finally told himself. He was in trouble because he’d been pursuing the “human experiments” case
for the past year and a half. Against orders. He had repeatedly disobeyed orders that went high up the chain of command. He
was
still
disobeying orders, and much worse than that.
“This is Tom Brennan for Agent Stricker,” he said when Stricker’s overly pleasant, overly efficient assistant came on the
line. “How are you, Cindy? Is Peter there for me?”
“Oh, it’s so nice to hear from you, Tom. One moment please.” Cindy was overly polite as ever. “I have to check and see if
he’s at his desk. Be right back to you.”
Surprisingly, Stricker picked up immediately. He spoke in a whisper—
always.
Made you pay attention. The trademark Stricker sibilance.
“Tom Terrific. How is paradise? How is Nantucket? You’re supposed to be sailing, riding the surf. Hanging out at the beach.
Get the hell off the telephone.”
“I’m calling from the beach,” Kit manufactured a high-spirited, buddy-to-buddy laugh. “Actually, I’m being pretty good for
me. I’m on my way to becoming a world-class beach bum up here. There’s just one little thing.”
“There always is, Tom. Always just one thing, always a hitch in your swing. You’re supposed to be getting used to not worrying
about the little things,” Stricker told him in the usual soft tones. “Wasn’t that our deal?”