Night Talk (10 page)

He got into his car and paused behind the wheel, going through the newspaper for a story about Ethan. He expected to see it on the front page, but didn't find it anywhere. The paper had probably been put to bed before the news broke.

He checked news on the Internet with his phone. No mention of Ethan's death, not even with local news. Ethan might not have been important enough to make national headlines, but a suicidal dive off a downtown high-rise would have been big local news. Had the feds put a blackout on news because Ethan had tapped into something critical? That sounded like a real possibility.

No news about a national talk show host having his office and apartment tossed by federal agents, either. But that had to break soon.

Coming out of the garage, he immediately started looking in his rearview mirror to see if he was being followed and quickly gave up the ghost on that issue. This was Los Angeles, a city that had more cars than people and where freeway traffic was bumper to bumper and door to door. Besides, it wouldn't be hard for the feds to keep track of him in a forest green '73 Jaguar XKE roadster. They were as common as wildebeests on the freeway.

Rohan lived in Marina Del Ray, forty-five minutes from downtown. Forty-five minutes or more from downtown to almost everywhere else in the L.A. basin was his yardstick. Sometimes it took a few minutes less, other times twice as long.

He checked news stations on the way. Not a word about Ethan, himself or stolen secrets. Someone jumping out of a high window while literally on the phone to a national radio host should have been the type of news that got repeated all day, especially when there was no hot item crowding it out. The news blackout was getting eerie. Getting a reporter to hold a story sounded feasible. Getting the whole news media to hold it didn't sound doable. The feds would have had to stop the story by gagging the EMTs, cops and coroner people who showed up at the scene.

He entered “Ethan Shaw” in a news search engine again on his phone, doing it as discreetly as he could. It was illegal to use a phone while driving in California and he wasn't in a mood to deal with another cop.

Nothing.
Nada.
Not only was there no news about Ethan Shaw killing himself, nothing popped up about hacker Ethan Shaw. Zero. Ethan was well known in the hacking culture, had a criminal record, and being a computer guy probably left a lot of footprints on the Internet. Nothing popping up was another surprise when every step Greg took brought more of the unexpected.

He remembered Ethan talking about his Web site, where he had laid out his personal beliefs about the state of the world. But that was also a no-show with a search.

He searched his own name and was relieved to find that he still existed on the planet. But there wasn't a word about one of his callers taking a dive off a tall building after phoning him. Or that he was a “person of interest” in the theft of government secrets.

“Incredible,” he said. What could Ethan have gotten into that would make the government put a lid on sensational news in an era where newsflashes flew around the world in seconds and got discussed by millions of people?

He thought about sending out a message to close friends and family that if he suddenly became a “nonperson” to look for him in a CIA-type secret prison, but decided he didn't want to push anyone he cared for into the arms of Mond and Company.

 

20

Greg retrieved the phone off the seat and did a search on Rohan. He got thousands of hits—the abducted author still had his feet on terra firma. The location of his head, though, was questionable. Rohan was always high-strung and accusatory when it came to his abduction. On the earlier telephone recording he sounded like he was being propelled by rocket fuel—or maybe meth from that same batch that the medical examiner said fried Ethan's brain.

The only time Greg had been to Rohan's apartment had been for a gathering of people who shared abduction stories. Rohan had been a little drunk and a lot arrogant, even contemptuous of the others, challenging their claims that they had been abducted, implying that he was the only one who ever had the experience.

Greg found himself stepping in to run interference for those whom Rohan lashed out at. Greg believed nobody had a lock on the truth about strange encounters. He knew that from his own experience. He also believed that listening to others was an art form that many people didn't possess. Rohan was too full of himself to patiently listen to someone else's experiences or opinions.

Tall, skinny, and full of himself, if Rohan hadn't experienced a strange encounter that turned into a money machine for him, he struck Greg as a guy who would have ended up in a corporate cubicle answering customer questions about phone service problems and telling coworkers at break time how they should lead their lives.

On the flip side of the coin, Greg read Rohan's best-selling book and had him on his show for hours talking about his strange encounter and was convinced that the man was telling the truth about having been abducted.

The encounter occurred when Rohan had been a student at UCLA five years earlier. He volunteered for a sleep-dream study experiment for course credit and some cash. The study sounded like something from the acid sixties—an injection of designer drugs to test how they affected dreams.

Rohan claimed that he came out of the overnight sleep-dream experiment with weird flashes of shadowy events and terrible headaches, but nothing he could put a finger on—until nature played a hand and he was struck by lightning while caddying on a golf course.

Nearly getting crispy-fried opened a memory door of what Rohan had experienced that night he took part in the university sleep-dream study—he remembered he had been taken by aliens to a laboratory where his reproductive function was examined. The entities that examined him wore formless masks, gloves and clothes so he couldn't see their precise shape or features, but saw enough to be convinced that they were reptilian.

Rohan then wrote his best-selling book about his experiences, claiming that the professor who oversaw the study, Carl Murad, was a lapdog and procurer for aliens, who controlled the world.

Made well heeled by the success of the book, he brought a lawsuit to force the university to let him examine the sleep study's computer system and records, but lost the case.

With Rohan having no legal way to get the files, Greg wondered if the man had persuaded Ethan to hack into the university's computer system or that of Professor Murad. Rohan was pretty wild about his accusations and even kept challenging Murad and the university to sue him for libel if they were innocent.

Murad, a psychology professor, was also a noted skeptic about abduction claims and had appeared on Greg's show several times to debunk them. Greg invited both believers and skeptics onto the show to state their positions in order to get a complete picture of an issue.

The professor said he had studied hundreds of abduction scenarios and maintained that most encounters were described as almost exactly the same, what he called a monkey-see, monkey-do syndrome based upon what the abductees had heard others say. He also claimed that abductees mimicked scenes and physical objects they had seen in movies.

Murad's position was that none of the UFO sightings or alien abductions reported had an extraterrestrial basis. The UFO sightings from witnesses whose credibility could not be doubted he simply brushed away as weather phenomena, terrestrial aircraft or other terrestrial occurrences, quoting air force “investigations” for his conclusions.

He debunked most abductee claims with accusations of fraud, lies, hallucinations, psychopathic desires for publicity and every other embarrassing and humiliating explanation he could come up with. Trashing the claims as strongly as he could was his meat and potatoes for selling books and gaining a reputation as an “expert.”

On the show Greg asked Murad why he and the university never responded to Rohan by getting a court-issued restraining order. Murad's reply was there was no way anything good would come from suing a student who'd had an unfortunate reaction to a scientific experiment. Rohan would make wild accusations that would turn any proceeding into a media circus. “What would come out of an attempt at a reasonable dialogue would be another best-selling book castigating the university and me,” Murad said.

Murad claimed he regretted Rohan had a “pathological reaction” to the medication that was used but that Rohan had not been capable of sitting down and discussing the situation rationally even before he had been medicated.

To Greg, Murad was a cold bastard, but smart and analytical, with a pit bull grab-at-the-throat approach to arguments. There was no question that some abduction claims and UFO and other strange-encounter sightings were faked or even the product of delusion. Murad used the obviously faked claims to attack the credibility of all encounters, no matter how credible the person making the claim was.

It was pretty much the tactic the government had used when dealing with the unknown or unexplainable—deny and pull the covers over it.

Murad had reproached Greg for what the professor called giving the lunatic fringe a place to express their experiences and opinions.

Greg's reply to him had been that as Hamlet told Horatio after seeing the ghost of his murdered father, there are more things in heaven and earth than Murad realized—including the paranormal.

Ethan. Rohan. Murad. Greg realized something about the triad. He was a connecting link among them.

 

21

Leon waited in a white van parked near Rohan's apartment building. His instructions were to wait in the van until the man he had followed previously on Broadway downtown arrived and went into the building. Once the man entered, he would be given more commands.

He usually didn't focus on potential victims for long even before he began getting instructions from the Voice—when he saw someone he would like to harm but the opportunity didn't arise, he would move on, forgetting about the person.

His blood boiled now as he waited for the man he had tried to run down on the street. The pain that had been inflicted on him for disobeying had not lasted long in his groin, but was so severe he'd screamed aloud as his testicles felt like they were being twisted in a vise.

This time he had no intention of disobeying. But he had a special place in his heart for the man who had caused him the pain and would settle the score in ways that the man could not even imagine in his worst nightmare.

While he waited he booted up his computer tablet, which provided a steady stream of words of praise for him, horror movies, S-and-M porn and the most violent and sadistic action games ever devised. Being denied use of the tablet by the Voice as punishment for indiscretions was as stressful as physical pain.

As he sat in the van playing a computer game that was banned in every civilized country he was not aware that everything he said or did was being captured by cameras. Nor that when he left the van, audio devices and cameras hidden in his clothes and tools kept him under constant surveillance.

He put aside his tablet as his prey arrived. Soon after the man got out of his car and went into the apartment building, Leon got instructions to go into the same building. He got out of the van, carrying a gunmetal gray, tubular device two inches in diameter and a foot long. It had a handle and an on-off button at one end. He wore overalls with the name of a heating and air conditioning company on a small tag on the front and spread out on the back. The business name on the overalls matched the name on the van, but Leon didn't pay attention to the names. The name, overalls and van were all changed frequently by his providers. He paid little attention to detail and did no planning more than a few hours in advance, and those plans usually related to eating, sleeping or being rewarded.

Right now his attention was directed toward the man who had caused him so much pain the night before. The thought of cutting open the man's chest and ripping out his heart while it was still beating made Leon's mouth water.

 

22

Rohan jerked the door of his apartment open as soon as he saw Greg through the peephole.

“Get in here.” He pulled Greg in and took a step out to peer down the hallway before closing the door and locking it.

Red-eyed and haggard, Rohan and his clothes needed a pit stop. His dark green A-shirt and running pants were wrinkled and stained, his beard scruffy. He was frenzied and looked ready to launch from whatever upper he had taken to get himself out of a downer.

“You okay?” Greg asked.

“Were you followed? Did you check—watch? They can do it without you knowing. Cameras are everywhere, peeping down from the sky; they don't need choppers.”

“Calm down,” Greg said. “I wasn't followed, but it doesn't matter. It's not difficult for the government to keep any of us under surveillance.”

Rohan hurried to his balcony's glass doors, pushed them open and stepped outside. He took a quick look up and down the street before rushing back inside, sliding the doors closed behind him.

“You shouldn't have come here,” he told Greg.

“You called me.”

“Yes—yes—you're right, I called you.”

“You mentioned Ethan Shaw.”

“Yes, Ethan, they got him.”

“Who got him?”

A car alarm went off out on the street.

“What's that?” Rohan rushed back to the balcony, pushing the doors open.

“Rohan! It's a car alarm, that's all. It's stopped.”

Rohan stared at Greg for a long moment and seemed to deflate. He came back into the room, looking defeated.

“No sleep, I need sleep. I'm confused. Too much shit coming down.” Rohan waved at the mess in the apartment. “Too much of everything. I didn't use to have much more than the clothes on my back and a car that didn't run half the time. Now I got money and nothing's right.”