Night Talk (34 page)

They had not only handled him like a lab rat, but left him unable to prove it and subject to ridicule if he even tried. Had he and Ali both experienced it, he would have had proof and support, but only his experiencing the abduction left him doubting even himself.

Was she right? Was he so deep into believing aliens were taking control of the planet that he imagined it? Dreamed the abduction and examination?

No. It was real. The memory wasn't something vague in his mind, not hazy, ethereal images of a dream world but of being physically handled. He remembered not only seeing things but being touched.

They came to the main road and he turned onto it almost absentmindedly. Deep in thought, he had to be reminded by her to turn on the headlights.

“You have that expression,” she said, “the one where you look angry and disgusted at the same time. Are you mad at me because I didn't have the experience you had?”

“I've been thinking about Ming the Clam.”

“Who?”

“It's a sea clam that was found a while back in the ocean somewhere around Iceland, I think. It was old, really old. They figured it was about four hundred years old so they opened the clam to get a better estimate of its age and found out it was even older—it had been down on the ocean floor for over five hundred years.”

“Okay … is there going to be a point to this story? Is it going to be something that makes me feel guilty for eating clams?”

“Turns out that Ming was the world's oldest living creature. But opening it up to see how old it was killed it. Apparently finding Ming's age could have been done another way without killing it but the scientists doing it didn't realize it was the oldest living thing.”

“Are you saying you felt like Ming the Clam tonight when, uh…?”

He shrugged. “I think the way we treated the oldest living creature even accidentally says a lot about us, about humans. We killed a living creature to satisfy our curiosity about it. People treat other people infinitely worse than the way Ming got treated. I can see why aliens would believe they have the right to dissect us to find out what makes us tick. Not just that, but looking at what we've done to each other and this beautiful green planet, aliens would be justified to send in exterminators to bait traps with sex and money to rid the world of us pests before they took over.”

She nodded and bit her lip. “Greg, do you want to pull over so I can drive while you get some rest?” Ali asked again.

“It's all a matter of the food chain.”

She just looked at him.

“The one highest on the chain gets to slice and dice everyone else,” he said.

 

67

They went back down the hill on the main mountain road, with Ali keeping up a conversation about their route. Greg was sure she was talking to keep him focused because she worried about where his mind was and where it was going. He went along with the conversation. He was worried about where his mind was, too.

“He saw us head down,” she said, “so this would be the way he went with his van. He might be waiting for us at the bottom.”

“‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward … into the jaws of Death, into the mouth of hell, rode the six hundred.'”

“What?”

“‘Charge of the Light Brigade.' I had to memorize a poem in grammar school and chose it. Like those British soldiers who made a suicidal charge, we don't have a choice. There may be a way to make it over the mountain from this road but it's just as likely we would end up on a dirt path fit only for goats and all-terrain vehicles or dead-ended. He thinks we're ahead of him so it would be a natural assumption that we're long gone. His only decision would be whether we went east or west on the freeway.”

“I know you don't want to stop the car long enough for me to drive, but please do me a favor. If you start daydreaming again about nineteenth-century poetry or the food chain, just slow down enough so I can leap out before you accidentally drive over a cliff.”

Greg thought over his conclusion that the van driver would assume they had continued down the mountain and got on the freeway. Would he believe they were heading back to L.A. or east toward San Bernardino and the desert?

“My take is that he'll think we went east, away from L.A., connecting to the 10 a few miles down the road. That's what anyone with good sense would do because the highway goes all the way to Florida. So right now he's on the freeway looking for us.”

“I don't know what to think.”

He didn't, either. Steering the car down the mountain and foothills toward the freeway was more autopilot than concentration.

He went from quietly introspective to a sense of anguish and horror about Bob and what must have happened to him, when from the foothills they had an aerial view of the housing area where Bob's house had gone up in flames. No fire was visible but emergency lights of fire trucks and police were still flashing.

As soon as they came to a major intersection, Greg turned off the road that led between the mountain and the freeway to make his way through city streets they hadn't been on before.

Ali asked, “Do you think we should call Franklin and let him know about Bob?”

“I think we should call him mostly to let him know so he can get away somewhere safer than his isolated place.”

She used the car phone but didn't get an answer. They looked at each other, both with dread.

“Throw the phone out,” he said, “rip it out and throw it out the window.”

“You think—”

“I've stopped thinking. I don't want to think about the mess we're in or what's happened to people who tried to help us. I just want to concentrate on finding the file and making sure the bastards behind the violence burn in hell.”

He put them on the freeway going back toward Pasadena and the San Fernando Valley, watching other cars, half expecting a van to pull up beside them and the killer to open fire. He was angry enough to be ready to ram the van at the driver's door if it showed up.

He wondered again why the killer hadn't opened fire when they were driving away from him on the mountain. It implied he didn't have a gun, but that didn't work for Greg. Guns were too easy to get.

“Any ideas?” she asked.

He knew what she meant. Where were they going now? What were they to do next? Time was running out; so was the money to finance places to hide. They also had no more clues about where the file was than when they started.

“We can go to newspapers, television or radio news,” he said.

“And tell them what? We have nothing to offer them except a bizarre tale in which all the incriminating evidence points toward you because of what Ethan told people. And me, too, now that someone who gave us a hand is probably dead. What do they call that kind of death? Suspicious circumstances? With us the persons of interest?”

Greg said, “There's no one I would ask for help because it would put them in danger.”

“I agree, I won't do that, either. I don't know about you, but I'm going to contact Inez Kaufman and ask her to put me into contact with the Aarons. She at least is in it voluntarily.”

“If you don't have the file, what are they going to do for you?”

“I don't know. What other options are there?”

None. He knew it. Maybe she was right. Maybe the Aarons could figure out a way of extracting the file from him. A file he didn't have, at least knowingly. And didn't know what it even contained. But he resisted the idea because he didn't trust them to help him out once they had what they wanted.

He was angry enough not to want help but to strike back, but they were still boxing against shadows. Most of all at the moment he needed rest. He could see that she did, too. They were both a little rummy from being on the run and one step ahead of a killer. Nerves stretched to the point where they were ready to snap. Anger mounting until he would do something stupid—like ramming the first white van that got in his way.

He needed to get off the road and think. Sleep on it without being disturbed by a cold-blooded killer. He could usually think while driving, but half expecting to be pulled over by the police or rammed by a van at any moment wasn't conducive toward puzzle solving.

He said, “I need to think about the file. With your help leading me through the ways Ethan could have hidden that file while expecting me to be able to find and open it, even though the NRO and everyone else on”—he glanced at her—“and off the planet aren't able to find it. There are cheap motels in the Valley, places with hourly rates because they do a booming lunch-hour business. I'm sure they get a lot of John and Jane Does registering. Let's get a room and think it out.”

“You're right, we need to get into Ethan's brain, figure out what he was thinking. He must have known you have zero ability to access an encrypted file. That means he must have expected you to get help. Maybe that's why he told me about you, to get me to help you decode it.”

That made sense to him. “You're still positive he sent it to me?”

“Absolutely. That's what he said. There's another reason, too. When Ethan spoke of you it was with admiration. He was an antiestablishment guy, you know, the kind who didn't have much respect for anyone who he didn't think was aware of all the invasions of privacy and Big Brother stuff that was going on. He admired you for standing up and saying what you believed was the truth. You were the obvious choice for receipt of the file.”

“Start thinking about the ways he could have sent it to me so we can discuss it at the motel.”

The world was truly cockeyed when he went to a motel with an attractive woman to use his mind.

 

68

The motel room they checked into had hourly rates and the musties. Musties was how Ali described the smell of the place. It was a little dank, a little armpit, topped off with stale cigarette smoke that had become part of the paint. He figured nicotine was the yellowish tint on the walls.

“There must be people who still have a cigarette after sex,” he said.

Besides the bed, the room had two end tables, one lamp that worked, a cheap TV on a dresser, a desk and chair. The low-wattage bulb in the working lamp was intended to hide the ambience, not create it.

Someone, perhaps a nooner who had enjoyed a brief but no doubt passionate stay in the room, had carved a heart with
TR
+
LC
on the top of the desk. Ali set her wasp spray can on the initials.

They assumed that the only thing that ever got changed in the room was the sheets, so they stripped the bed down to the sheets, whose stains appeared old enough to have survived wash cycles.

Ali laid out her coat to sit on when she got on the bed and leaned back against two thin pillows.

Focusing on how Ethan would have sent him the file in a way that avoided the clutches of the world's most sophisticated spy agencies had frustrated both of them for a good reason.

“There is no way it can be done,” Ali said. “Anything Ethan sent you could be intercepted and opened by the encryption crackers the NRO would put to use. Even if you were teamed up with a world-class hacker-cracker, like Ethan. If nothing else, that NSA encryption-breaking system the Aarons helped Ethan get access to could break anything Ethan came up with.”

That was just common sense to Greg. If he could open it or have someone help him open the file, experts like Ethan that the government kept in its employ would be able to open it.

“So,” she went on, “let's assume that Ethan couldn't encrypt the file in a way that permitted only you to open it because no matter what form he sent it in decoders could crack it. The question then becomes not what form the file was sent in but how he sent it for your eyes only.”

Greg sat at the chair next to the desk and leaned his head back to stretch the tight muscles of his neck. “How he sent it for my eyes only. Sounds like something from James Bond.”

“It's been more like
The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
If they can open anything Ethan sent, and if Ethan's telling the truth that he sent it—”

“They must already have it.”

She shook her head. “They don't have it. I have a friend in the NRO, attached to the director's office. The one who helped me get into Mond's investigation results. He told me they definitely didn't have it. At least not twenty-four hours ago.”

“So if Ethan was thinking straight when he sent the file, he would know that it would be intercepted if he sent it in a traditional way. Since they haven't found the file, he sent it in a way that only I would recognize.”

“Making it invisible to everyone else.”

“How can I see it but no one else can?” Greg asked.

“Greg, if I knew the answer to that…”

She got off the bed and paced, frustrated and angry.

He sat in a chair at the desk and kept his mouth shut. Watching her steaming and pacing, he decided that if she'd had a hammer, she would have demolished the place, starting with him.

She said, “Three people are dead that we know of, God knows how many others. We're hiding like trapped rats in a sewer. Something pretty weird is going on at the NRO that's making them cover their asses any way they can.”

“Tell me something I don't know.”

“Whatever is going on has nothing to do with aliens invading and taking over the world. We don't need aliens to mess up our lives, we're already pretty good at that ourselves. It's a given that whatever the God Project is, it's going to blow the roof off the NRO just as Snowden's revelations did with the NSA.”

“So who's behind the killings, the attempt to retrieve Ethan's file? The NRO? A bureaucratic monster out of control?”

“I don't know who, but I have a pretty good idea of why. A big part of the Snowden effect was the loss of billions of dollars by U.S. firms in security products and services around the world because countries and big companies realized that we were spying on them. The financial fallout from the NRO will be infinitely greater because it's not a big agency with beaucoup employees like the CIA and NSA. The NRO only has a couple thousand administrative employees and most of those are on loan from the CIA and Department of Defense. Everything else is contracted out to corporations. And you can bet there's a short list of who has made the right political contributions to get themselves on the short list.”