Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) (2 page)

Even though the CIA had acknowledged the place existed (it was on Google Earth now for frak’s sake), that didn’t mean they were holding an open house any time soon.

It changed with Ivar—or rather the sudden lack thereof, of Ivar—which, considering Ivar’s recent history and what had happened during the
Fun in North Carolina
, might not be as strange as it seems.

But Ivar and Doc—who was with Ivar, at least initially—were both physicists, and they understood the law of entropy (or thought they did) and knew that when something was taken away, something was returned in kind (or thought they knew).

Or at least they understood a distorted law of entropy, which Doc would come up with later. Sort of.

If there was a later.

It changed at the Ranch, outside of Area 51 on the other side of Extraterrestrial Highway, but still pretty much Nowhere, Nevada, known to only a few as the headquarters of the Nightstalkers.

It was only because Eagle had a hippocampus twice that of a London cabbie, and the resultant phenomenal memory, that it was noticed at all. Noticing didn’t mean awareness though.

Which meant Eagle was going to have to learn something new.

If he was given the time.

It changed for Moms by figuratively traveling into her past, both in place and time. She was already in the place, having made the drive of tears back home. She was sitting on the front porch of the abandoned shotgun shack where she’d grown up in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas. Interstate 80 was to the south, across the flat plains, but so far away that no sound traveled from the eighteen-wheelers racing across the middle of the country.

There was no other house in sight, just miles and miles of slightly undulating fields, and despite all the years since she’d left, Moms still had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. It had started when she’d entered Kansas and grown stronger every mile she drew closer to “home.” The house was empty, long deserted. Her younger brothers never came out here, smarter than she was, understanding some memories only brought pain.

It seemed Moms was a masochist, going back to her roots in order to remember.

But sometimes, going into the past is necessary in order to move forward.

There are variations on that, such as changing the present in order to move forward, which Moms was soon to discover.

It had changed for Foreman, closing in on seventy years of service, in February 1945 in an area called the Devil’s Sea, off the coast of Japan, in the waning days of World War II. The event was after he and his pilot were forced to ditch because of engine trouble. Minutes later, the rest of their squadron simply vanished into a strange mist in that enigmatic part of the world. No trace of the other planes or crews were ever found.

Then it was reinforced in December of that same year, the war finally over, on the other side of the world, when he begged off a mission because of the same premonition he’d had before the Devil’s Sea flight, and watched Flight 19 disappear from the radar in an area called the Bermuda Triangle.

He’d determined then and there that he had to know the Truth.

So he’d gone from the Marine Corps into the short-lived precursor to the CIA, the Central Intelligence Group, in 1946, then morphed with it into the CIA, where he moved upward, and, much more importantly inward, into the darkness of the most covert parts of various branches whose letters and designations changed over the years. But their missions grew more and more obscure, to the point where he’d outlived and outserved all his contemporaries so no one in the present was quite sure who exactly he worked for anymore or what his mission was.

If he worked for anyone at all.

Not that anyone really cared.

They should.

He was now known as the Crazy Old Man in the covert bowels of the Pentagon and by some other names, associated with bowel movements.

How crazy he was, some people were about to discover.

Cleopatra’s Needle pierced the sudden downpour with the relative indifference of granite, having faced the many depredations of time in its 3,500 some-odd years of existence. However, just one hundred years in New York City’s weather had done more damage to the hieroglyphics on the four faces of the obelisk, particularly the southwest corner, than over three millennia in Egypt’s much drier climate. It wasn’t the rain as much as the acid pollution rising from the city, some of which came back down in the rain.

Edith Frobish hated the rain for more than just the damage it did to the Needle. Still, she paused as she always did to look at the ancient Egyptian monument set, strangely, in Central Park in the middle of Manhattan, in the middle of New York City, far from its origin. The fact the obelisk had nothing to do with Cleopatra VII (yes, there were six before
that one
, but none had achieved
her
fame/infamy, so only the historically finicky added the number—count Edith among those who did) was a trick of historical “publicity,” more notoriety, that Edith would never understand. Why name something for someone who had had nothing to do with it, other than ruling briefly a thousand years after the Needle was commissioned by the Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh, good old Thutmose III? He was considered the “Napoleon of Egypt,” expanding the empire to its widest breadths, but did anyone remember his name? Nope. But they remembered Cleopatra, seventh with that name. Plus, few knew or cared there had been six Cleopatras before the one who’d bedded mighty Caesar, then not-quite-as-mighty Mark Antony, and then had a date with a snake.

Was it just because she’d snagged and shagged two notable Romans? Edith found such an idea misogynistic to the extreme, which showed that despite her brilliance and degrees, there was much she didn’t know about the real world.

Edith also couldn’t understand that Cleopatra’s Needle sounded so much better than Thutmose’s Obelisk. To her, the correct history should always win out over popularity.

She was rarely invited to parties.

Towering a surprising seventy feet high, weighing over two hundred and twenty tons, and covered in hieroglyphs, the Needle was part of a set of three, the others located in Paris and London. Technically, though, the structures were not a set, as Edith would tell anyone who bothered to ask.

Few did outside of the Patrol. But those inside cared very much about such things.

The one in London was a twin in size to the one here in New York, also commissioned by Thutmose, and they were both originally from Heliopolis, Egypt.

The one in Paris was commissioned by Ramses II, some time after old Thutmose’s two, and was originally in Luxor. He also had the inscriptions carved on Thutmose’s two to celebrate his own victories, trying to permanently write his own history.

Edith tried to focus on the inscriptions, but in this thunderstorm, being pelted by rain?

All three obelisks were moved by the Romans under Augustus (who’d taken down Cleopatra’s second Roman, Mark Antony) to the Caesareum in Alexandria, a temple begun by Cleopatra to honor her first Roman lover, Julius Caesar, and completed by Augustus, who dedicated the temple to a cause he held dear: himself.

Narcissism seems a trait of emperors, or vice versa.

Thus, Cleopatra entered the path of the Needles tangentially, but not directly, in that she built the temple in front of which they were placed after her death. It all gets rather confusing.

But such distinctions in history can be important.

The New York obelisk was emplaced in Central Park in 1881 and Edith could regale one with tales of how it made its very difficult way from Egypt to New York and why, but that would be important if one day she were walking by and there was suddenly no obelisk.

That would be bad.

She viewed the Needle as a signpost of history that she checked religiously. But today, perhaps it was the downpour that kept her from looking closely enough, or else she might have seen something in the hieroglyphics that would have alerted her. But perhaps, given the vagaries of the variables, the story hadn’t even changed yet.

But she had a job to do and was carrying things that shouldn’t get wet, primarily lots and lots of documents. One would think in this digital age a thumb drive would do, but for her position, a thumb drive would not do. Documents were the original source and were also more secure. Back and forth to the various museums, the Archives, the Smithsonian, and ranging even further afield, covering the globe, as the situation required, Edith always came back with documents. Sometimes she came back with artwork costing millions of dollars, “borrowed” under the authority of the auspices of the museum, but really for the Patrol to analyze.

She never came back empty-handed.

On this trip she’d been gone only a few hours, having to dive into the stacks at the main branch of the New York Public Library to retrieve information someone in the Patrol had requested. Interestingly (the requests were always interesting, even the time someone had asked about the history of teddy bears), the RFI was about another obelisk, the largest one in the world, the Lateran Obelisk, so named because it was in the square opposite the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran.

In Rome.

Seemed the Egyptians had a hard time holding on to their obelisks.

Edith’s head was now full of arcane facts about not only the Lateran Obelisk, but the history that was woven around it. Over thirty-seven meters high, the Lateran had over ten meters on Cleopatra’s Needle. Why exactly someone on the Patrol had requested this particular piece of information, she had no clue (she was never given one for any of the many arcane requests), but the research, as always, had been fascinating, leading her from the Obelisk to the as-fascinating history of the Archbasilica. The research had cascaded upon her as she dove deeper and deeper into the stacks until she had accumulated enough for several volumes, which she was now going to have to distill down to a cogent, six-page report.

Always six pages. No more. Less was better; a mantra of the Patrol. But details were important, so they always ended up being six pages. She’d even begun shrinking the font size, until finally the Administrator noticed and told her to stop.

The research was why she loved her job. Boiling the research down to six pages or less; not so much.