Nightstalkers (14 page)

“Which brings us to the Rifts,” Doc said. “For some reason, as they form, they start emitting muons. And the muons decay in a weird way. Which is why I came up with my multiverse theory. I believe that this difference means the rules of physics on the other side of the Rifts are different than our rules.”

“Can I ask you something?” Kirk said.

“That’s why we are here,” Doc replied.

“What happens to the Fireflies if the Nightstalkers aren’t around to destroy them?”

“They are very destructive, depending on what they occupy. Before the Can, the Nightstalkers had to focus on police reports,
news reports, anything that indicated a strange occurrence and then go investigate.”

“Maybe we’re pissing them off, opening Rifts into
their
world,” Kirk noted.

“Maybe,” Doc allowed. “But we live on
our
world.”

“Not arguing with you, Doc.”

“The Can gives us thirty-eight minutes of warning that a Rift is starting. It picks up activity, but we can’t locate it for thirty-eight minutes. At that point, there’s enough activity that one of the other Cans picks up activity, which starts us in the right direction. Then, after forty-six minutes, we can triangulate and pinpoint the exact location.”

“Not much time.”

“It’s why the Protocol for getting to the Snake, loaded, and airborne is thirty minutes,” Doc explained. “And there’s something else,” Doc added. “Another reason we take this so seriously. Why the Russians might even be more worried about the Rifts than us.”

“And that is?”

Doc glanced at the young man at the computer. “Let’s head back up. It takes a while.” Before he walked away, Doc picked up the thick stack of printouts.

They went back down the tunnel and got on the elevator.

“Tunguska,” Doc said.

“And that is?”

“A place in the middle of Russia. Where there appears to have been a nuclear explosion before there were nuclear weapons. In 1908 something went off; most think it was a meteor exploding in the air, just before it hit the surface of the planet. It blew with a thousand times the power of the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima and took out eighty million trees.”

“That’s a lot of trees,” Kirk said as the rock walls surrounding the elevator raced by.

“Yes, it is,” Doc said. “The kicker, though, was when the Russian Can went online. They picked up very, very faint traces of the exact same type of weird muonic activity from Rifts still emanating at Tunguska. Right in the center of where that blast occurred.”

“That’s not good.”

“It is not.”

“So the Rifts can develop into something very bad,” Kirk summarized.

“Ms. Jones believes so. She thinks there is a possibility that a Rift can become a Portal. She thinks that what was forming on our last mission was a case where a Rift was changing, trying to grow. Trying to send something else through. Something that might have come through back in 1908 and caused the Tunguska explosion. Or the explosion might even have been a Portal failing.”

They both swayed as the elevator abruptly slowed, then came to a halt. Two Support guards were waiting, one sliding open the gate to the elevator, the other maintaining security. They walked down a hallway, out a door guarded by two more contractors, and then into a massive hangar, burrowed into the side of Groom Mountain. It was quite the contrast as Doc got behind the wheel of the old beat-up Jeep and drove them out to pass by the most advanced aircraft being tested in the world.

As Doc pulled into the growing darkness, Kirk looked over at him. “You know, Doc, in Sniper School, they’ve got a real problem in their recruitment program.”

“What is that?”

“They’ve got to select individuals who can do two contradictory things. Shoot another human being on nothing but an order. And also
not
shoot on order. Lots of people can do one or the other, but it’s a rare man who can do both.”

They passed through the Area 51 rear gate, heading toward the Ranch.

“I imagine so,” Doc said. He glanced over. “I also imagine there is a reason you bring this up.”

“It occurs to me, no offense intended,” Kirk said, “that you’re just like one of those people we go after who open up Rifts. You want to figure the Rifts out, too. What’s causing them, what’s on the other side. It’s just that you’re smarter than those other scientists.”

“How so?”

“You’re doing it from the inside. All those printouts are important to you. The Can is important to you beyond simply being an early warning device. It’s a research device.”

A muscle on the side of Doc’s face quivered. “I’m not a traitor.”

“I wasn’t saying you were,” Kirk said. “I’m saying you’re doing it the smart way. Takes a unique man to do that. Perhaps that’s what Ms. Jones saw in you.”

THE NEXT DAY

Burns shifted position. Some of his wounds had not quite healed, a terrible itching that just wouldn’t stop. He peered through the night-vision scope at the Chapel Hill dog park. It was empty, and a lone flickering light cast long shadows across the hard-packed couple of acres.

The doctor’s headlights were like searchlights in the night-vision scope as the car pulled into the empty parking lot a hundred yards away. Burns tracked the doctor as he scurried to the gate. The reticle in the sight had the man’s head perfectly framed.

The doctor had a flashlight, which wasn’t exactly covert, but Burns didn’t have high expectations after meeting him in the parking lot.

Winslow made his way to the trash can and pulled up the lid, wincing at the foul smell from dozens of poop bags. Such was his lust, though, that he reached right in, fingers searching.

That’s when Burns got the feeling. It was one many combat vets experienced and the smart ones trusted. It
was
too easy and too dumb. Burns shifted from Doctor Winslow and began to scan the area beyond the parking lot, into the trees.

Through his night scope, Burns caught the faintest glimmer in the trees a quarter mile away and he immediately knew what had caused it: someone breaking the seal on their own night scope and letting the computer-generated light out. It was gone as quickly as it had appeared, but Burns pressed his eye socket tighter into his own rubber seal to prevent the same mistake.

There was a sniper out there covering the doctor making the pickup.

Where the hell did Winslow get a sniper? And Burns knew right away: an investor protecting his investment.

In the dog park, Winslow withdrew the hard drive from the bag with a trembling hand.

From his perch, Burns could have sworn the doctor was doing some kind of jig. A Snoopy happy dance perhaps? As the doctor ran back to his car, Burns focused on the real threat in the trees. He waited, a trait Nada had impressed upon him as essential to survival.

After thirty minutes, the sniper emerged from the trees. Burns tensed as a second person, rifle slung over his shoulder, emerged fifty meters away. A dark van, headlights off, pulled into the parking lot and both got inside.

Two snipers on over-watch.

Burns nodded. This was good. There would be extra protection.

THE NEXT DAY

The Research Triangle at the junction of the towns of Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh, North Carolina, started out using the brains from nearby Duke and the University of North Carolina to do just that: research. Then more businesspeople with financing were bought in, more patents were sold, and a shift from pure research for knowledge and science to research for profit took over the region.

There is a difference.

Southeast of Chapel Hill, and southwest of Durham, near Jordan Lake, is a large gated community set pretty much in the middle of nowhere: Senators Club. In the most exclusive part of the exclusive Senators Club, Doctor Winslow was preparing for a dinner party, the day after having secured his future at the dog park.

He stared at himself in the mirror while the electric toothbrush buzzed in his mouth. He used it three times a day for the full two minutes, just like the instructions said. He was good about instructions and he always read them first, while whatever he bought was still in pieces in the box. He wondered about
people who’d buy something and start putting it together like they’d been born just knowing how to assemble a bookshelf. They were the people who left off screws that didn’t fit, as if the manufacturer had sent no plans, no instructions, and didn’t have a purpose for everything in the box.

Over the buzz inside his head, he could hear the caterers preparing for the party and his wife’s excited voice telling them what to do. As if they didn’t do this for a living and she wasn’t just a nuisance. He supposed such nuisances were part of the perils of their job description. But why hire professionals if you were going to flit around them and tell them how to do the jobs you hired them to do? He had married Lilith even though she rarely read or followed instructions, leaving it dependent on her moods. He glanced at her sink in the bathroom bigger than most people’s living rooms. Her toothbrush sat on its charger and it had never run for the full two minutes. He’d timed her on several occasions and she’d never broken one minute. Always moving on to the next thing before the first was properly done.

His vanity was pristine and Lilith’s was covered with bottles and brushes and cords to blow-dryers and irons and things whose purposes he couldn’t imagine, and he ran a lab that made some of the most sophisticated scientific equipment in the country—in the world, for that matter. But his wife’s vanity and its machines were as much a mystery to him as relativity was to her. She wasn’t a dumb woman, almost smart, but he’d caught her reading in the huge Jacuzzi tub one time with a lamp clamped to the towel rack above her head to shine down on the pages while the cord stretched across the room to the nearest plug.

She had a doctorate, too, but he never thought of her that way. It was in some arcane field that served no useful function:
interdisciplinary philosophy. Sometimes he resented that they shared the same title of doctor, as if the top of her heap of education somehow equaled his.

He rinsed and walked to the large closet to the right of the bathroom (also bigger than most people’s bedrooms) that was all his. His wife left his laundry hanging on the hook outside the door and never invaded this inner sanctum, like a redneck would value his man-cave with his naked-girl racing calendars, old fridge full of beer, and gun rack.

He stopped at the first built-in and admired his six-piece watch winder, rhythmically rocking back and forth, keeping the elegant timepieces inside running. It was his favorite thing in the house. It cost more than most people’s watches and its entire purpose was to keep the timepieces running because they weren’t on his moving wrist. It was actually the height of indulgence for a man who’d grown up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, spending his childhood in the barn, wrist always moving over and over, never stopping, in between morning chores and evening chores and going to school and to sleep at night, as if he were the machine he now admired doing the work for him.

He always saved the “choosing of the watch” for after he was dressed, the crowning event in his ritual.

He opened the drawer where his socks were neat little bundles arranged by color and use: dress, casual, and workout, with subdivisions in each. There were times when he knew his wife wouldn’t be home when he opened all the drawers and cupboards in the huge closet like some secret cross-dresser on a quiet afternoon and just stared at the perfection of a place for everything, and everything in its place. He loved how the colors of his dress shirts worked from white to light to dark from left to right, matching the suits hanging over them. And the ties on the motorized
rack could roll up, rank after rank, like soldiers going to war, also ranked by color.

But he was always drawn back to the socks. His mother had tried to keep up, but the farm had taken too much out of her and she’d drawn the line at sorting socks. Everyone has their limits. She cleaned, she had her own rules, but his socks she dumped in his drawer in one tangled mess. Luckily he was an only child, so he didn’t have to sort his out from a sibling’s. But the amount of time he spent looking for two that matched? In grad school he’d sat through a boring lecture by writing an algorithm for the hours he’d wasted on what should have been solved before the drawer.