Authors: Shawn Hopkins
He drank the rest of his scotch and touched the earpiece in his ear, dictating a codeword the phone used to connect with the desired recipient, the voice recognition software authenticating and securing the line simultaneously. “He just dropped it off. What do you want to do? Yeah, I’m watching it.” A pause. “Pity.” Then he touched the earpiece again, tapping it twice, and spoke another name as he took the disc to the TV, anxious to see what those working on the artifact had concluded. He pushed it into the side of the thin television, activating its use as a four dimensional computer.
****
The Senator sat in the back seat of the car and ignored the umbrella man as he closed the door. He did, however, notice the driver quickly tap his earpiece.
“Home, sir?” the driver asked.
“Yes.” He pulled the top off the bottle of scotch and started drinking. Then he leaned forward and turned on the TV that was built into the back of the bench seat in front of him.
There he was. On a major news station.
“Someone could get hurt doing this…”
Had he been twenty years younger, he might have tried running or something. But not now. Now he knew it was useless. It was his own stupid fault anyway. He drank some more. It wasn’t as if the Council on Foreign Relations hadn’t been suspected of conspiracy in the past, but it had always come out unscathed.
And even now while the news was spinning the story in the CFR’s favor, he knew that those he answered to would not be happy about the new enemies they’d be waking up to in the morning. It would just be more work for them in the end. He lit a cigarette. The fact that public awareness posed no threat to the Establishment suddenly didn’t mean so much to him.
It started to rain again.
“Perfect,” he muttered.
“What was that, sir?” asked the driver, looking back through the rearview mirror.
“Nothing.” He watched New York blur past the window. Like the rest of the country, it was a mess. The economic collapse and the violence that ensued had turned it into a trash heap. He glanced at the driver. “So what happens now?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Don’t play stupid with me, boy.”
After a moment of silence, the response came. “You know how it works, Senator. You made yourself a liability.”
His heart froze. He couldn’t believe it. “It’ll look suspicious, me getting offed right after my statement. It’ll lend credence to my words. To theirs.”
The driver shook his head. “Your wife. She’s twenty-three years younger than you.”
The Senator closed his eyes, tilted the bottle straight up, and drank as much as he could.
The driver continued. “You followed her to her lover’s house. Shot them both, then turned the gun on yourself.”
He stopped drinking, held the bottle away from him. “And I suppose I’m to be in a drunken rage?”
“Nothing personal, sir.”
The Senator’s face flushed red, the alcohol emboldening him, but before he could utter another word, the driver turned around and shot him in the head.
2
A
s Melissa Strauss pressed her hand
onto the shiny surface, seeing a red light turn green and then hearing the big steel door release its hold on the walls surrounding it, she wondered again at this special assignment. It wasn’t every day her employers had her prancing through super hi-tech facilities, touting around hi-level security clearances, and keeping the company of armed guards. No, it was the desert she was accustomed to, maybe some remote villages in South America if she was lucky, but a place like this? It had been years since she had the luxury of working in air-conditioning, let alone all the space-age equipment that was everywhere in this place.
Just a few weeks ago she was in some disease-ridden part of Africa overseeing the creation of a water reservoir, part of a two-year sanitary project to elevate Africa’s state of living to meet UN law. But that came to an abrupt stop when an “order from above” suddenly changed her itinerary, sending her instead halfway across the continent and into the Middle East. Her new directive, which she understood to be top secret and a matter of national security, was to obtain an undisclosed object from another “government employee.” She was then to transport it back to North America. To
this
place. There was no turning it down, it was an order. Besides, if it got her back to Vermont quicker, she couldn’t complain.
She walked through the door and down a corridor, her white lab coat floating on the cool, sanitized air. At the end of the corridor she came to another door, this one requiring her NAU Identification card, her voice, and a retinal scan.
“Welcome, Doctor Strauss,” a pleasant synthetic voice stated. She walked through and into the lab. There was a loud click and a beep as the door shut and locked behind her.
“Where’d all the security go?” Joe Theissen asked, looking up from a microscope and peeking over the top of his glasses. His fifty-six year old face was weather-beaten and serious, but his eyes glowed with a purpose that was known to be infectious — as they were now. Though relatively stern, his casual lop-sided grin continually blew his cover, revealing to be true the rumored light-heartedness he enjoyed away from the work. He was also employed by what was formerly known as the US Department of Agriculture, and he knew Melissa very well from past projects.
Dr. Strauss looked around, suddenly aware of the military’s bizarre absence. “I didn’t see them on my way in. They just left?”
Joe shrugged, returning his attention back to whatever foreign artifact was under the lens. “You’d think they’d at least tell us they were leaving.” He squinted, a free hand focusing the lens. “You see that guy Mark or Thomas?”
“No.”
“Janice?”
Again she shook her head, making her way to a closet. “I’m sure they’ll be back soon.”
“They should have been back ten minutes ago with my dinner.” He stood, watched her as she hung up her coat. “Speaking of dinner…” He was always trying to talk her into a date.
After walking over to him, and ignoring the suggestion, she placed a hand on his shoulder and leaned over the high-tech microscope, pretending to be interested in whatever it was he was observing. “We’re supposed to be studying something else, you know.”
“Blah, blah…” He waved his hand, dismissing her comment. “I don’t care about that stupid thing. I was on the brink of a legendary discovery before they packed me up and sent me here to meet you.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I bet.”
“Besides,” he continued, “I sent the diagnostics three hours ago. It’s done.”
A look of concern washed over her face. “Joe, what about the others?”
He gently nudged her away from his work, bending back down into the eyepiece. “Don’t worry, I didn’t cut any corners. I just didn’t feel the need to sit around for another week trying to persuade those atheist chimpanzees of its obvious spiritual implication.”
“Chimpanzees?”
“With an emphasis on the last two syllables.”
She left his side and walked over to a glass case, her mind grappling with what Joe had just told her. The other “chimpanzees” were actually brought in from the recently internationalized NASA program, and they would not be happy. When they found out that Joe cut all their individual research short by finalizing their findings and sending a report without their consent or knowledge, there would be fireworks.
She looked through the glass case, at the object she had escorted half way around the world. For some unknown reason, it seemed to be of major importance to the military. But she and Joe learned rather quickly not to ask questions, and the amount of money they were promised for both their work and their discretion made it easy to ignore the soldiers, the high-tech equipment, and this super-secret government lab beneath some building in Washington DC.
Joe looked up from his work again. “Oh, they said the power might go out tonight.”
Melissa looked around the lab again, the bright light glowing off all the equipment. “What do you mean?” she asked, confused.
Joe stretched again, spoke his words through a yawn. “He just said they were doing some kind of drill or something. Said the power might go out for a little bit. Said it’s no big deal. Light a candle or something.” He winked at her.
She rolled her eyes. “It’d take more than a candle, Joe.” But a subtle voice whispered in the back of her mind, telling her that something was off. From the time she had taken the object into her possession, she’d been escorted by a soldier. And from the time they’d arrived at this place, guards had covered their shadows with automatic weapons. Complete and total secrecy was demanded of them, every move they made watched, all their communications to the outside world strictly monitored. Every day, NAU military personnel rotated in and out of the project, supposedly protecting them — though from what they couldn’t imagine. And now, without any warning, they were just
gone
, at a time the power was expected to go out? “I haven’t been allowed near a phone since I’ve been back, haven’t been allowed out of their sight. And now they just disappear, leaving us completely unguarded in a power outage?”
But he just shrugged, his mind elsewhere. “Maybe the thing isn’t what they thought. Feels nice though, not having them breathing down our necks. Gives us some privacy.” He winked at her again.
She smiled, but it wasn’t genuine. “Don’t forget the cameras,” she said, while waving at the small dark spheres hanging from the ceiling. But despite the attempt at humor, her heart rate began to quicken, her eyes falling to the object that lay suspended within the glass case. Whether she was turning to it as a means of escape, engaging her mind on a different matter, or whether she was subconsciously drawn to it as a suspected answer to her unvoiced concerns, she didn’t know.
And then the power went out, plunging them into total darkness.
Joe swore out loud.
Melissa held her breath.
“No telling how long this
drill
is going to last. You wanna get comfortable?” Joe’s voice came from across the room.
“Joe,” her voice was shaky, worried. “I don’t like this.”
He had spent enough time with her in the past to know when she was scared, and the tone she had just used didn’t attempt to hide her fear now. “We’re fine, Melissa. No one even knows this place exists. And even if they did, they’d never be able to get down here.” But he was trying to reassure himself with his own words, his subconscious whispering warnings of its own. “It’ll probably be just a few minutes.”
“All this high-tech equipment, all the blast doors, the cameras, the retinal scans… it doesn’t make sense for them to just pick up and leave and then shut the power off on us, Joe. And no one else is back from dinner yet...”
Joe tried to calm her down. “Maybe they were stopped topside, told not to come down because of the drill.”
There was silence in the darkness as she contemplated the probability of this, but before she could reject his consoling, they heard footsteps coming down the corridor.
Joe quickly shed his unconcerned act and ran through the darkness to a giant stainless steel counter that contained two large, empty cabinets underneath. “Melissa, over here,” he urged.
She followed his voice, and they climbed into the cabinet just as someone pushed open the heavy door and entered the room.
They held their breath, unable to see anything in the darkness.
And then a beam of light split the darkness in half.
“Joe? Melissa?”
It was Mark.
Melissa let out a sigh of relief and began to move, but Joe put a firm hand on her shoulder, keeping her still.
The beam of light swept across the room, bringing to sight whatever it fell on.
“Dr. Theissen? Are you here?” Mark asked again. “Dr. Strauss?” He began walking forward, through the lab, the flashlight continuing to sweep the room. Finally, he seemed content that he was alone because the ray of light no longer surveyed his surroundings, but focused instead on just one thing. The classified object resting within the glass case.
They listened as Mark’s footsteps echoed off the hard floor, the length of the beam shortening as he came up to the case. They watched through the crack in the open cabinet door as the light suddenly went berserk, Mark using the flashlight’s bottom to smash the glass case. Had the power been on, alarms would have sounded so loud that cars would have begun pulling over on the streets above. But now… nothing.
“What’s he doing?” Melissa whispered in Joe’s ear.
Joe’s legs were beginning to cramp up, and he had to concentrate extra hard to ignore them. He ground his teeth, softly nudging Melissa into silence.
Mark grabbed the object, shining the light on it. He stood there for a few seconds, mesmerized by what was in his hands as if he actually knew what it was that he held. Then he turned on the broken glass and headed out the way he had come in.
“What do you have there?” a new voice suddenly asked.
Neither Joe nor Melissa could see what was going on because Mark’s flashlight was pointed at only an empty spot on the floor, hanging uselessly at his side.
“What are you doing here? They sent you—” It was Mark’s voice, and it lasted only as long as the new arrival let it.
“Where are they?” the new voice asked, cutting him off.
“They’re not here.”
“They have to be here, they weren’t picked up leaving the lab,” the strange voice objected.
“What difference does it make?” Mark asked. “I have it.”
“They’re here somewhere. Spread out and look for them.” It was an order issued to more unseen figures, the sound of their hastened steps filling the lab.
“Who sent you?” demanded Mark.
Melissa craned her neck to peer further to the right, to try and see what was going on. As soon as she saw Mark, he was raising the flashlight and pulling out what appeared to be a gun. There was a scream from one of the armed men that the light exposed, causing him to jerk the night-vision from his head while Mark shot him in the chest.
The loud gunshot sent Melissa back against Joe. She didn’t know what happened next; the room just seemed to explode.