The Fury and the Terror (22 page)

"What else?"

"MORG would nuke an American city because your sister wouldn't give them what they wanted? Something only
she
could give? Was she sane?"

"I've never doubted it," Danny Cheng said after a few moments. "The insanity is to be found inside Multiphasic Operations and Research Group. 'Out of control' doesn't really describe them. Kelane was on her way to Plenty Coups, but I don't think she intended to show up there, no matter what."

"It's not certain she was on the plane."

"I want to be sure. If she was, I want to know why she was being taken to Plenty Coups."

"Someone of your stature in the information business—"

Cheng shook his head. "I've never been able to get much out of Plenty Coups. It isn't life-enhancing to poke around, even at the fringes. The security is fanatical. An installation the size of the Pentagon, all of it underground. I hear rumors. I appreciate them for their entertainment value.

Plenty Coups is a support facility for extraterrestrials visiting the earth. It's the gateway to a subterranean advanced civilization that was here before apes came down from the trees. It's a command post for the New World Order MORG is planning to spring on us one day when there's not much else to watch on TV. It will be the world's largest multiplex, showing nothing but old Schwarzenegger films to an audience of the numbed. Or else it's a new kind of super cult experience, the Disneyland of death trips." He paused. "Now that might turn out to be close to the truth."

"Kelane was a neurosurgeon?" Bertie said, as if she was thinking out loud. "Would that have something to do with MORG's interest in her?"

"The world has a pretty good supply of neurosurgeons," Danny Cheng said.

"Neurosurgeons who are also psychic? With the ability—I'm only guessing here—to work from inside the brain, guiding the laser or the gamma knife or whatever?"

"She has to be beautiful. She has to be tall and part Chinese and have long legs encased in red leather. Above all, she has to have the brains to pick up on what I missed. We would make such a great team. Bertie Nkambe and Danny Cheng. I say this in a purposeful businesslike tone. Keeping it all business here. But you can see; the shirt I have on. It's soaked through."

Bertie said primly, "I'm spoken for."

Sherard said, "Anything else we can do for you, Danny?"

"Coming to that. The plane crash. There was a survivor. Her name is Portia Darkfeather." He turned to his laptop again for verification. "American Indian name, I'd say. She's a contract employee of a MORG proprietary called Accelerated Counter-Insurgency Defense, which provides advanced military training for police and sheriff's departments around the country. Ought to come in handy while they're serving and protecting. ACID is also a cover for MORG's Elite Force. Portia Darkfeather underwent five hours of surgery at the Innisfall Medical Center and has not regained consciousness. Official hospital bulletin." Cheng devoted several moments to stroking his lips before getting to the point. "How close," he said to Bertie, "would you have to be to Darkfeather in order to peep her?"

"Way close. It's in the touch. Sometimes. Other times, I don't see a thing. There are no channels open." She frowned. "And if she's just had surgery, I could cause a lot of trouble by touching her. I might—"

Danny Cheng said, "I've heard about the bleeding thing. That's for real?"

"Forget about it," Sherard said. "I won't—you're not doing this, Alberta."

"But—Tom, Portia Darkfeather might know what it was all about, why MORG has to have a psychic neurosurgeon. After all Danny has told us, aren't you curious?"

"It isn't what we came out here to do. There's more than one huge risk involved. You can be sure she's under heavy guard."

"If I could get my hands on clothing, anything else that belonged to Portia Darkfeather, that would be a safe means of--"

"No."

Danny Cheng looked frustrated. His father turned to Bertie.

"I never thought it was a good idea myself. But Danny can be overbearing at times. So I agreed to this meeting. We thank you for your concern. And I am most grateful to have had this opportunity to become acquainted with you."

Bertie said, "Did any of you feel something, just then?"

As she spoke Sherard was aware of the tremor that seemed to ripple through the house.

Cheng shrugged. "We get those all the time. It's the Ring of Fire. Somewhere around Palo Alto, canned goods are falling off the shelves and everyone having sex just came too soon."

"That's not an earthquake," Bertie said quietly, rising to her feet. The tremor continued and intensified.

Something rose in the starry night outside the bay window behind Danny Cheng. It was a jet-black helicopter with stub wings and a vectored-thrust propeller. The house vibrated from the nearness of the powerful helicopter, but it made no sound as it hovered fifty feet away in a nose-down attitude. The canopy of the Cobra-style chopper was tinted almost as dark as the fuselage. A twenty or thirty-millimeter cannon protruded from beneath the nose. Instead of rocket pods there were black boxes with antenna-like rods attached to the wings.

Danny Cheng turned slowly to see what everyone else was looking at. "Which of your ex-wives has one of those?" Sherard asked Cheng. Bertie wheeled and went to the double doors of the study. She tried to open them.

"Locked," she said. "That girl who brought in the drinks cart? I had a hunch I should have peeped her.
Damn
."

"I hired Song three weeks ago," Danny Cheng said, adding defensively, "The chick had great references."

Chien-Chi said with a hint of scorn, "Her pussy was her most impressive reference, is it not always so."

"What are you carrying?" Sherard asked Cheng.

"Nine-millimeter Glock."

"Give it to me, and get away from the windows."

"You're going to shoot that chopper down? Before you commence hostilities, let's consider the fact they haven't done anything."

"Yes, they have," Bertie said, coming swiftly back to them. "Don't you feel hot?"

"I run hot and cold."

"I don't. Give Tom the gun and pick up your laptop."

"It is hot in here," Chien-Chi said.

Sherard caught the black polymer automatic Cheng pitched to him.

"It isn't the room, it's us. Our body temperatures are going up. They're beaming low-frequency radiation in here."

Danny Cheng picked up his laptop, glancing at it. "Screen's gone black. It was all right a second ago."

"Get out of the way," Bertie said. She threw the table lamp against a wall and the room went dark. She took hold of the oval table and upended it.

"Hey, that cost—"

"Take your father over there and hug the floor," Bertie said, her face glistening from perspiration. "We're in a microwave oven here. Tom, we don't have much time."

"Shoot the lock off the door!" Danny Cheng said frantically.

"Your doors are too thick," Bertie told him. "A nine-millimeter won't dent that lock. Get Chien-Chi away from here!
On the floor
. Close to the wall but away from the windows."

"You go too," Sherard said, giving her a push. He picked up a two-pound rock that had spilled from the yellow bowl and side armed it through the middle of the bay windows, taking out most of one pane.

"I'm burning up!" Danny Cheng wailed.

Sherard wiped his eyes, crouched behind the table, and took aim at the black box on the right wing of the helicopter. He wondered if they were totally relying on their radar technology to cook everyone in the room from the inside out, or if they would retaliate with the chain gun when they saw muzzle flashes. He hoped they wouldn't want to attract that much attention in one of San Francisco's best neighborhoods. ECM, ELF, Spoofers—he didn't know what was in the boxes. He wanted only to disable the conical antenna, about two feet long and shaped a lot like a circumcised penis, that he was sure was beaming microwave energy into Danny Cheng's study. Another minute of it, and their blood and brains literally would begin to boil. Half a minute, maybe. He already was finding it nearly impossible to breathe, to think clearly.

Roughly twenty yards. He hadn't devoted all that much shooting time to pistols, although he usually carried a Colt Frontier model .45 on safaris. The Glock had a ten-round magazine and fixed sights, probably a four-inch
barrel. Adequate at
that range, with, fortunately, a moonlit sky behind the soundlessly hovering helicopter.

Through the hole he had made in the bay window he shot the hell out of the antenna and the black box behind it, then rolled out of the way just before the nose cannon erupted, shouting, "
Down down keep down!
"

Then the room lit up, tracers, and the air was filled with flying splinters from the oval table, sharp flecks of granite from the scored floor, plaster dust from the ceiling. It went on for less than ten seconds. At least one hundred rounds had been fired. After that it was quiet, except for someone moaning.

"Bertie!"

"Okay! So is Chien-Chi."

She'd had the presence of mind to pull some of the pearl-gray carpet over the two of them as they huddled against the wall.

"Anybody care about me?" Danny Cheng said petulantly.

"You hit?" Sherard asked. The moaning continued.

"No. It's coming from outside."

The study doors had been shattered by the heavy strafing. One of them was half off the hinges. Cheng kicked the door free of the other hinge and it fell into the hall. The Chinese girl with the long braid was on the stairs nearby, holding on to the railing with one hand, holding herself, blood running through the fingers clutching her abdomen.

Pain and surprise. She looked young enough that dying had never occurred to her.

"You were waiting in the wrong place, weren't you?" Danny Cheng shouted at her. "How were you going to serve us, medium well? Who did it? Who set me up?"

"Don't!" Bertie said. "Help her, she's—"

Blood dripped from the girl's mouth and she died without making another sound, letting go of the railing and tumbling slowly down the stairs.

"Oh, God," Bertie moaned.

"How do we get out of here without being seen?" Sherard said to Danny Cheng. He had to say it twice.

"Wine cellar. There's an iron gate at one end, steps going up into the garden."

"Let's go."

"No, man. Nobody runs Danny Cheng out of his own house."

"He is giving us good advice, Danny. Where are your bodyguards? Why haven't they come to help us?"

"
Nobody!
"

Sherard shook his head angrily, took hold of Bertie and guided her down the stairs. She stumbled near the body of the Chinese girl, almost fell, put down a hand to steady herself. It came away bloody. She stiffened as if rocked by a blow, eyes drifting up in her head.

"Bertie!"

"I'm okay. I'm okay."

Sherard gave her a handkerchief to wipe off the blood. She turned and gave Chien-Chi a pleading look. He smiled sympathetically.

"I cannot leave him. He's foolish sometimes, but he is my son. Turn left at the bottom of the stairs. It's the door all the way back next to the kitchen. Don't worry about me."

"Good-bye, Chien-Chi," Bertie said. There were tears in her eyes.

GREENWOOD LAKE • MAY 29

T
he Ford Taurus had been up there for quite a while, in the woods off the unpaved road. Three hours and twenty minutes, by Geoff McTyer's Swiss Army watch. It was twenty after one in the morning. Below the Taurus and approximately a quarter of a mile away, Riley and Betts Waring were still up, moving restlessly through the lodge that overlooked the lake. Windows were open. Lights were on in several rooms. There was a small fire on the hearth. Riley had done a lot of snacking in the kitchen. Coffee, chips, sandwiches, fudgsicles. Now he was slumped and snoring in front of the big-screen TV, a heat pad at the small of his back. 'They could have heard him without the help of the directional microphone Geoff had set up on the hood of his car. Betts had gone through most of a pack of Merits on the unscreened front deck, elbows on the railing, gazing across the alpine lake at mountain peaks still laden with the snows from a recent spring storm.

"Guido Kukierski," Haman said softly. "Solly Lorowitz. D. Hammond Fairchild. Al Farlow. Myron Leets."

It had been immediately clear that Eden wasn't in the redwood lodge overlooking the lake. Not clear if the Warings were expecting her. Sometimes they could hear Riley and Betts okay, but there were problems with reception, frequent breakups due to the stiff wind from the north. The temperature at this elevation had dropped to around forty-five degrees. Geoff longed for some of the coffee Betts had brewed, for innocent good-humored conversation around the kitchen table. His butt was numb. It was cold enough so that their combined breath was fogging the windshield. He and temporary Phil. Of course he'd been temporary too, no denying they were right for each other. Even if it nauseated him to be reminded. He couldn't start the engine and run it for heat. In the silence of the wilderness around them, where an owl's cry carried for a mile, Betts might hear. Nothing for him to do but sit there, Haman droning away.