Nightstalkers (5 page)

TWO DAYS LATER

It started with the pretty postdoc who was the point of contact at the University of Colorado.

The Courier had been up all night partying at one of the frat houses, only two years removed from college himself. Or, more accurately, two years removed from his single year of college. After being kicked out of college, he doubled down on that year sucking dirt in the Marines, including a year at Bagram Air Base on the perimeter guard post, shooting at a whole bunch of nothing and basically being bored to tears. The stories he’d told the wide-eyed rich kids at the party were true—that is, if the older grunts who’d told the stories to him in the first place had been telling the truth.

So at the end of his year in ’Stan, when the contractor came calling with offers of big bucks and lots of time off for combat-experienced Marines (they considered a year in-country combat experience, so the boredom counted for something), the Courier had signed on the dotted line and kissed the Corps good-bye. The deal had turned out sweeter than he’d expected. They didn’t send him back to the ’Stan but rather to the Depot.

Like any other gig, though, there were drawbacks. One was the implant. The gruff retired gunny sergeant who’d taken him through Depot processing at Area 51 had told him it was a minor physical procedure—he wouldn’t feel a thing—and the actual device only had to be worn during the time when he was working. During his two months off for every one on, why, no problem, he could leave it at the Depot. That was where guys like him, the Support for a bunch of high-speed people called the Nightstalkers, were stationed. Underground on the Area 51 military reservation in the middle of no-fucking-where, Nevada. It sounded a lot cooler than it was, both figuratively and literally.

The gunny hadn’t been totally up front. The actual procedure was sticking some long, really thin wire into his chest. It left the tiniest of nubs sticking out just center and below his left nipple. That wasn’t coming out as long as he was in Support. Then when he came on duty they strapped a belt around his chest that had a matchbox—scratch that, he wasn’t old enough to have used matchboxes—an iPod Mini–sized device right over the nub and connected it to him.

When he’d asked what the device was for, the old gunny had told him: “So we can track you and make sure you’re okay. We don’t want nothing to happen to you, sonny-boy.”

So, okay, for one month’s work and two off, he could deal with it. And, of course, for the pay. That was ten large every month, even the ones he wasn’t working. The Tea Party would have a fit.

They gave him some guns, a souped-up armored van, a thick binder full of what they called “protocols,” and a handheld device the gunny called an Invoicer (the way he said it indicated it was capitalized, like a lot of stuff around the place). It contained his deliveries for this tour of duty.

“Like a FedEx driver?” the Courier had asked.

The gunny had just glared at him for a moment, then shook his head. “Read the Protocols, sonny.” The gunny had looked about as if the walls had ears. “You do good on Support, there’s a chance you make the team out at the Ranch. They’re short one body on the ’Stalkers. Been short a while. Ms. Jones is real picky about who makes the team.”

What are we, back in high school?
the Courier thought but did not say, having had experience with gunnies in the Corps.

The key to being a Courier, the gunny explained, was to keep a low profile. A single panel truck, a single man, playing it cool, wouldn’t draw attention the way a clearly armored vehicle and escort convoy would.

Whatever
, the Courier thought.

There were eight deliveries, all around Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. Pick this up here, drop it there. Then the next, and the next.

He’d gotten briefed, along with other new Support personnel, by some Nightstalker people with weird names: Moms and Nada and Doc. Moms told them to be very, very careful, and Nada told them to read the Protocols very, very carefully and then follow them exactly to the letter, and if they had any questions, any at all, there were no dumb questions, to call on the sat phone they were each issued.

The Courier knew from high school there were dumb questions. Those were the nerds who never got laid.

At least in high school. He wasn’t experienced enough to know the inverse of that formula as one got older.

The last guy, Doc, had some really scary shit to say about bugs and viruses and nukes and stuff that would kill you, which the Courier wasn’t sure how to take. According to this Doc guy, looking the wrong way could cause you to get some disease and die a horrible death.

At first he’d felt really cool, driving the van with all the guns and high-tech gear. After the seventh time, though—loading a sealed locker full of who the hell knew what in the vault in the back, driving 387 miles from some computer tech place in Boise, ID, to Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah (he knew the exact mileage because one of the Protocols required him to fill out all these little boxes on the electronic invoices and two of them were start and end mileage of each run, as if he were going to detour to Malibu or some such; plus he had no doubt the van GPS and the damn thing plugged into his chest were also recording everything)—it began to get boring.

He hauled ass for invoice eight, looking forward to the promised time off, with pay, after delivery. Vegas. That’s what was on his mind as he tore through the Rockies on I-70 at ninety miles an hour. Six hundred and twenty-four miles to Boulder. Protocol said don’t speed, but they’d given him a badge and a very official-looking card with his photo on it, that the gunny had told him would make any local law enforcement fuck off, because he was working for the FEDERAL government, even though technically he was only contracted. That technicality made a difference, a big one. Federal employees took something called the Oath of Office, the very first law enacted by the very first Congress, so those Founding Fathers had felt it was important. Courier got ten large each month instead and signed a contract. Either way, he got into Boulder a night early.

And partied.

He was sure there was something in Chapter 40 of the Protocol (it was pretty damn thick) about not partying the night before a drive, but he’d read what he needed to and skimmed the rest. He’d make the pickup the next day right on time.

And he did. Wearing fresh khakis, his Glock nestled inside his leather jacket, he checked the file once more before he entered the Biochemistry Building at the University of Colorado. He recognized the Point of Contact in the courtyard outside the building from the picture in the file and she looked better in person than the drab photo that must have been taken for her student ID. He walked over.

“Hey.”

That drew him the withering smile pretty girls reserve for “not now, I’m busy” until he pulled out his badge and ID.

“I hear you’ve got something for me, Ms. Debbie Simmons.”

Her eyes grew wide. She looked around as if there were spies hiding behind the bushes. Which the Courier found humorous because they weren’t in the bushes, but rather hundreds of miles overhead with a clear line of sight. His first platoon sergeant in the Marines had told him no one ever looked up. He had been referring to snipers in trees, but once the Courier got to Nightstalkers’ Support, old Nada, in his briefing, had modified that to include what you couldn’t see way up there circling the planet. The unblinking eyes in the sky.

She swallowed and nodded. “Follow me.”

They entered the building and she walked past the elevators, which the Courier found odd, and opened a fire door. They began to troop up the stairs, which was when the Courier became rather intrigued with her ass. He tried to make small talk, but she was in crisis mode and everyone knows that people worried about their careers seldom flirted. Instead they tended to talk and explain.

“I don’t know why I got stuck with it. I just did the lab work. The professor did all the real work on the project. And the professor was insistent that no one have access to her data.”

The Courier could give a shit, and her taking one step at a time was hurting his knees. He wanted to bound up at least two, if not three at a time. She kept explaining as if the Courier hadn’t read the Invoicer, or been briefed by Moms and Nada and Doc.

He and the others had been grilled with Nada “what-ifs”:
What if you can’t locate the Point of Contact? What if the Package is breached? What if gravity as you know it ceases to exist
...

Or, as everyone in Support called it, the Yada-Yada from Nada. But never when he was around.

“The problem is, well, the professor, she must have gone on sabbatical, at least that’s what the dean said. Sort of. And I got stuck with it. So we brought it over in the safe it came in and up the elevator and into the most secure lab.”

If you got an elevator, why are we taking the stairs?
the Courier thought.

“I followed the rules in the book the professor had.”

The Courier felt heartened that he wasn’t the only one who had to follow Protocols.

“It’s locked up here, because the bio people have the most secure areas.” Simmons literally shivered. “It scares me, some of the stuff they work with.”

“Why are we climbing the stairs?”

“I use the stairs for the exercise,” she explained. That explained her tight body, but also a sense of narcissism to include him in her workout routine while he was on a job.

“Everything should be all right and up to date,” she continued as they made it to a door with a big
6
stenciled on it.

The Courier wanted to tell her Nada’s theory during his lecture about
should be
, which Nada had said often translated to
what the fuck?

“I don’t really see the big deal,” Simmons prattled on as she led him down the hall to a door with all sorts of warning signs and big biohazards symbols. “It’s pretty small.”

He decided to show the college girl up, with a tidbit of knowledge he’d had hurled at him during the Support briefing by Doc. He tapped the closest yellow sign. “The engineer who developed the biohazard sign said: ‘We wanted something that was memorable but meaningless, so we could educate people as to what it means.’”

He remembered that because it was one of the dumbest things—among many dumb things—he’d been told, not even realizing his remembering actually validated the engineer’s point.

She stopped talking for a moment and stared at him as if he had two heads. “The professor has never taken a day off since I’ve known her. She’s always like ice; nothing bothers her, but this,” the girl nodded at the steel door, “this bothered her. Why would the professor take a sabbatical now?”

“Right,” the Courier said, not really listening to her, eyes on her breasts. Figuratively, wishing for literally.

Shaking her head, Simmons entered a punch code and the door slid open.

They walked over to another door that required a second punch code, as well as a retina scan this time, so he knew they were getting close to the Package.

There was a safe inside the next room.

An old iron safe, like Butch and Sundance used to rob.

She pulled out a rumpled piece of paper and began twirling in the combination and he stifled a laugh. He could see Nada’s long hand in this last line of bullshit.

“So the Package is all right,” she said with enough degree of uncertainty that even the Courier realized why the government
was taking this particular thing away from the university boys and girls. “So you can see the problem?” she asked, indicating she had no clue what the problem was. She swung open the heavy door and pulled out a small metal box.

For the Courier the problem was that his knees were killing him.

She was anxious to pass the problem over to him. “I don’t know why the dean was so upset, since he had to have given the professor the sabbatical.”

The Courier tuned her out once more. He didn’t see any opening to the box. There was a set of numbers etched on the side after the letters
ASU
. He checked his Invoicer. Bingo. “Okay.” He held out the Invoicer. “Sign here, here, and here on the screen and I’ll be off.”

“The professor was really, really upset about getting this in the first place,” Simmons said as she scrawled with the electronic pen. “She said it should have never been sent here. She said someone named Doc should have been responsible, not her. And certainly not me,” she added as if he didn’t get it.

“Someone is taking care of it. Now. Me.” The Courier grabbed the Invoicer from her and hefted the Package under one arm. It was light, for which he was grateful.

“What about the safe?” Simmons asked, looking as if she had to take the thing home.

“Not on my form.”

“I did everything correctly, right?” Simmons asked. “You’ll keep it safe, right?”

She seemed overly concerned about something for which she was no longer responsible, even the Courier could see that. “I work for the government,” he said. “This is my job. It’s taken care of.”

He didn’t say good-bye. Not that it mattered: she didn’t do small talk, yet she talked too damn much, he thought as he took the elevator down. He unsealed the back of the van and secured the box in the vault that took up half the rear, the rest being full of weapons and other military equipment.

He got in the driver’s seat and accessed the onboard computer. He synced the Invoicer, indicating a positive pickup, and waited for the machine to tell him his next, and final for this tour, destination.

Area 51 Archives
.

The GPS calculated the route in seconds. Seven hundred and seventy-seven miles.

“Hot damn,” he muttered as he started the van up.

Not far from Vegas at all.