Independence Day: Silent Zone (20 page)

Brinelle had talked
Brackish into going to San Mateo, but not into taking her along. As
groovy as
the idea sounded, it wasn't worth the risk. He didn't want to read a
newspaper
article about her unfortunate collision with a postal truck. So he
drove up the
coast by himself, bought a map, and followed the address to an
industrial area
near the freeway.

Sunnyglen
Villa turned out to be a slightly rundown Victorian mansion sandwiched
between
a bus yard on one side and a warehouse on the other. The property was
surrounded by a tall chain-link fence with razor ribbon at the top.
There were
bars over all the windows, even on the top floor. When a security guard
stepped
onto the front porch and lit a cigarette, Okun put the car in gear and
slunk
away. It was a strange place for a mental institution. It looked more
like a
prison, and Okun had a feeling they weren't too keen on visitors.

He
cruised
around for a while until he found a suitable motel and checked in. It
had been
an unusually emotional day for him, and that night he did something he
only did
when he was feeling blue. He wrote lugubrious poems in the journal he
reserved
for the keeping of scientific notes.

The
next
morning he walked into a barbershop and told the man, "I've got a job
interview today with an insurance company. Make me look like a square."

"Crew
cut?" the barber asked.

Okun
nodded—a pained nod. "A crew cut sounds perfect."

When he came out,
his ears felt like twin jumbo radar dishes, and he felt the breeze on
the back
of his neck for the first time in years. His next stop was
a department store, where
he spent most of the money
he had left on a business suit and a briefcase. He changed in the
store's
parking lot, getting help from a nice old lady who knew how to tie a
tie. He
was ready.

When
he
drove up, the front gate was open. He parked his car and walked up to
the front
door and tried the handle. It buzzed and clicked open. The inside of
the place
looked very different from the exterior. The entry had been converted
into a
waiting room like a doctor's office, with a few chairs and old
magazines. A
video camera in the corner slowly swept the room. There was a counter
with a
sliding glass partition behind which sat a willowy woman with a soft
voice.

"Hi
there. Can I help you?"

"I'm
here to see Dr. Immanuel Wells."

"And
your name, sir?"

"Radecker.
Agent Lawrence Radecker, from Central Intelligence."

When
the
woman asked to see some identification, Okun glanced around to make
sure no one
was listening then whispered through the partition. "I'm on a special
assignment, so I'm not carrying any ID. My instructions are to have you
call
headquarters, and they'll confirm. I was told you had the number."

"Oh,
sure. Have it right here." She looked at him with big doe eyes. "If
you'd like to have a seat. Agent Radecker, I'll call right away." She
smiled and slid the glass door closed.

Okun tried to act
casual. He picked up a magazine, but soon tossed it aside and began to
pace.
CIA
guys can pace if they want to,
he told himself, nothing suspicious about that. He
glanced out the
windows every few seconds to make sure no one was closing the front
gate. He
was already plotting a quick retreat if she asked him for the word of
the day.
Every morning, Radecker had a two-second conversation with someone
calling from
CIA headquarters. They would tell him the identification password for
the next
twenty-four hours, he would repeat it and hang up. The code words, of
course,
followed no pattern. Monday would be ZEBRA, Tuesday would be UNIQUE,
and so on.
He knew he'd never guess, so if she asked him, he was prepared to tell
her he
had it written down in the car.

"Thanks
so much for waiting. If you'll follow me, I'll take you to Dr. Wells."

At
the
back of her tidy little office space was a thick glass door she
unlocked with a
key. They stepped through it into the home's dark central hallway and
walked
to the living room, where three men and one woman were gathered around
a
television watching a soap opera. All four of them were ancient, well
into
their eighties or nineties, and barely glanced up when the receptionist
said
good morning. The paint was peeling in places, and there was a slight
reek of
cleaning products in the air.

"Have
you met Dr. Wells before?"

"Not
face-to-face."

"But
you know he doesn't talk anymore." She could see by his expression he
didn't. "Maybe you'll have better luck with him. To tell you the
truth," she said, opening a screen door, "it was a relief when he
stopped. That man used to talk so darn much I had to wear earplugs."

They
stepped outside onto the roomy back porch. A couple of deck chairs
faced the
backyard, which was a green riot of fruit trees, bushes, and weeds. A
dilapidated gazebo was being strangled by heavy vines of wisteria. The
lady
walked up to a frail-looking man in a wheelchair and spoke as loud as
her mousy
voice would allow. "Dr. Wells, this is Agent Radecker. He's with the
CIA,
and he wants to ask you some questions." The old man didn't stir. She
shrugged and smiled. "Well, good luck."

Okun
pulled up a chair. He'd been expecting to meet a deranged and violent
lunatic,
but this guy, except for the wheelchair, looked like a member of the
PGA's
senior golf tour. He was clean-shaven, well groomed, and handsome in a
balding,
bulldoggish way. He wore pressed white slacks and a powder blue sweater
that
matched his piercing blue eyes.

"Dr.
Wells? Dr. Wells? You can hear me, right? Look, if you can understand
me, give
me a sign. Make a movement or blink twice or something."

Without
turning his head, the old man raised his right hand, then slowly lifted
his
middle finger.

"OK,
that's
a sign. Listen," he whispered, "I'm not really from the CIA. I just
said that to get in here. And my name's not Radecker. I work at Area
51, and I
went AWOL so I could come and talk to you. I'm probably gonna be in
VDJ, very
deep Jell-O, when I get back, so help me out, man."

Wells
turned
and regarded his visitor, waiting for him to say more.

"Hey, can
you write? If I ask
you a question, can you write out the answers? I brought a pern.

"What's Area
51?" the old
man asked in a raspy voice. "I've never heard of that."

So he
could
talk. Okun
started nodding. "Are you testing me or don't you remember? You used to
work there. You know, Groom Lake, underground labs, the crashed ship?"

"Go on, I
still don't know what
you're saying."

Derrr. It
suddenly occurred to Okun
what was happening. The old man was waiting to hear some proof that he
wasn't
some amateur UFO investigator. "OK, I got it. Dworkin. Lenel. Vegas
every
Friday. There's a long table in the kitchen with two picnic benches.
The tiles
on the bathroom floor are mostly white, but some of them are purple,
and the
handles on the middle sink don't match. Hey, what's the matter?" He
noticed tears welling up in the old man's eyes. "Oh no, please don't do
that." It was the second day in a row he'd made somebody cry.

"I knew
you'd come. I've been
waiting and waiting. Why did you make me wait so long?"

"I just
found out where you
were yesterday."

"Didn't
Dworkin send you?"
He turned suddenly paranoid. "Who sent you here?"

"Nobody sent
me. Relax.
Yesterday I talked to Mrs. Gluck, and she showed me a letter you wrote
her.
Dworkin and those guys all think you're dead. That's what we were told."

"So
you came to break me out? You can't do it alone; we'll need help. We'll
go
immediately into San Francisco. There are two television stations
within a few
blocks of one another. I've already written the press release, but it's in my room.
Everything has been planned. I'll
need one person to accompany me into the—"

"Whoa.
Hold your horses there,
Kemo sabe.
You're losing
me."

Wells
started over and explained his plan. It was urgent, he said, that they
alert
the world of the impending alien invasion which, he said, could begin
any
minute. This was the same plan, presented to the members of Project
Smudge five
years earlier, which had led to his forced retirement and imprisonment.
He
pointed to the strings of barbed wire hidden in the foliage. He began
explaining, in too much detail, the sequence of events leading to his
ouster
from Smudge, and expressed his deep loathing for the men who had
opposed him.

Without
stopping, he segued back to his moment-by-moment plan for breaking the
story to
the news media. Every movement had been scripted in his mind, every
enemy
reaction anticipated. It was a chess game pitting himself—and a few
assistants—against the worldwide conspiracy to keep the matter quiet. As he spoke,
Okun
realized that Wells was, indeed, crazy. He wasn't the incoherent
lunatic he had
expected to meet, but he was obsessive-compulsive to the nth degree.

"It may already
be too late, but we've got to try. Every man, woman, and child must
devote
himself to the salvation of the planet. Once they hear, once they
understand
that we face annihilation, they will make the necessary sacrifices.
Everyone
working together. It will require the transformation of the world into
a
single, tightly organized war machine. Politics,
economy, society, all must change if we hope to survive." He said
everyone
who knew and didn't tell was a war criminal worse than Hitler, the
worst filth
on the planet, and in the future he would call for their public
executions.
Okun himself was one of the conspirators, but wisely didn't point that
out to
the old doctor.

Obviously,
once you were on this man's enemy list, there was no getting off it. So
Okun,
who'd spent the last couple of days acting, assumed yet another role.
"I'm
going to help you. I'll come back with reinforcements later, but right
now let
me ask you a couple of questions. The first thing is the addendum to
your
report. I read the part you wrote after the Roswell thing, but the part
you
attached later was missing. What was in it, your ideas about an
invasion?"

"Don't
belittle me, young man. These are not merely ideas. At the time of the
encounter I believed I had been given a glimpse of the EBE's home
planet. Later
I came to believe I had been shown the planet which had once belonged
to the
host animals, the ones they had gutted and used like a suit of
clothing. Have
you seen the photographs of the larger bodies?"

"Yeah,
they're horrible-looking."

"Before the
planet I saw was ruined, it had been a jungle, a lavish hothouse of
dense plant
life. Endless, stretching to infinity. Even below the surface, it
teemed with
vegetation. Think of the differences in anatomy between the two
creatures.
Which one would be better adapted to this planet? The tentacles would
allow the
larger being to climb and reach and grasp. The other one was all wrong.
Its
body was too delicate for an environment like that. I'm sure the little
fiend
didn't show me his planet. I think he was explaining why he had come to
ours.
It's because they'd slowly ruined that place he showed me, consumed
everything
on the surface until they were reduced to tearing shreds of moss off
the walls
of caves. I think they're coming here to eat."

"Groady."

"Another
thing. If this creature really was a scientist, then what was it doing
hauling
food around? That doesn't make sense to me. Because I had shared a
personal
memory with it, I assumed it had done the same. It certainly
felt
like a personal
memory, so
immediate, so real. But how could those two animals be the same? Then
it
occurred to me: they share thoughts, they share a mind, they must share
a
memory."

"Exactly.
That's the same principle they used in developing their ships. They
share an
energy source just like they share mental activity."

"They're
a hive, my friend, and that makes them dangerous. Individually, they
may not be
as intelligent as you or I. But collectively, they may be more powerful
than we
can imagine. Did Sam ever tell you about my experiments with the bees?"

Okun
shook
his head.

"I kept a hive
for about six months out in the old shacks next to the main hangar. As
an
experiment, I began hiding their food source. But every day they'd find
it within
minutes. I expanded the radius to about two miles around the hive,
moving the
food to random locations at random times of the day. Then the scariest
damn
thing started happening. After about three months of this, I'd go to
the place
I had decided to put the food and they'd be waiting for me! After that
I tried
as many tricks as I could think of to fool them. And they'd work for a
while,
but they never worked twice. This went on until it occurred to me that
they had
learned to anticipate me. They'd learned my moves well enough to
predict my
behavior. In the end, I set the hive on fire. Now if bees can do that,
imagine
what these other monsters are capable of.

"And
we're not even making it difficult for them. We bombard space with
radio waves
advertising our position. That must stop at once. They're out there
right now
watching us, studying us, waiting for the moment to strike."

"You're
absolutely right. So, you think there's more than one ship?"

"Are you
stupid? Don't you understand what I'm telling you? There are
hundreds
of
ships like the one we recovered, and they are nearby. They come every
few
months and snoop around our military installations or experiment on
people and
animals. Don't you know about all those bloodless cattle mutilations?
Call the
Pentagon and tell them to send you the files. Soon the time of study
will be
over, and they will attack. We don't know how powerful their weaponry
is, but
our Air Force won't stand a chance against the speed and
maneuverability of
their ships. In a few months all of our planes and missiles will be
spent. Then
they'll start picking off our ground forces. There won't be time
to build the weapons we're
going to need. We must
sacrifice now to build a space defense network of our own. Satellite
lasers,
deep-space torpedoes, orbiting minefields of nuclear warheads. If we
have time,
we can put factories in space capable of building a fleet of warships,
then
launch an attack of our own. It may already be too late, but we've got
to try.
You have to get some good men and storm this place."