Transformers Dark of the Moon (11 page)

The way she said it helped underscore just how ridiculous he sounded. It made him feel a little better about it all. Not a lot better, but a little.

He got out of the car and popped the hood. “Give it a shot,” he said, and when she turned the key and failed to start the engine, he studied the array of wires to see if he could find the problem.

Sam heard a footfall behind him and knew who it was. “It’s a rare model Datsun,” he said without looking. “Very vintage.”

Dylan Gould was both a car enthusiast and probably a multibillionaire. Guys like that had no reason to mince words, and Dylan was no exception. “Looks like a train wreck,” he said bluntly. As he spoke, he reached in under the hood and started making a few adjustments and connections with his bare hands. Sam was about to tell him to keep his mitts off the car, but the words died in his throat. Why should Gould not touch it? What was he going to do? Break it?

Continuing to poke around, Dylan dropped his voice and spoke so softly that only Sam could hear him. “Carly told me you’ve been struggling jobwise. Just so you know, I’m on the board of Accuretta systems. So I put in a call. Sent in a recommendation.”

Sam suddenly felt as if a fist had clamped around his heart. “You—?”

Dylan nodded. “Keep it between us, okay? She’s so proud of you. Way to go.” He gave Sam a friendly pat on the back. “Lucky man.” Then he stepped back and called, “Try it now, Carly!”

Obediently the car roared to life on the first try, sounding better than ever.

His job done, Dylan walked away, leaving Sam feeling more utterly defeated than he had ever been in his life. His feet leaden, he dragged them back to the car and sagged into the driver’s seat like a balloon leaking helium. “What is it?” Carly said, concerned.

“Nothing.” He pointed in the general direction Dylan had gone. “Good guy.”

“Y’ know the problem with him, though?” She rubbed his shoulder. “He’s not you.”

She kissed him, but even that wasn’t enough to bolster Sam’s spirits by that point. He threw the car into gear and drove off, the setting sun hanging low in the sky behind him.

We move among humanity, and most of the time no one realizes that we are there. We hide in plain sight. It makes sense that the humans with whom we have most closely allied ourselves would adopt our methods …

   The sign on the gate outside the nondescript federal building read “Health and Human Services.” It wasn’t on the main road, but people drove by it every day. They were ordinary citizens who never gave it so much as a second glance or the slightest thought. Had they done so, they might have wondered why it was that something so relatively mundane looking was surrounded by not one but two twelve-foot fences, with concertina wire running along the top of the interior fence. They might also have done a double take over the notion that a building ostensibly containing something as utterly benign as Health and Human Services would be guarded by armed soldiers.

Then again, they might not have. America had been in a state of perpetual alert for over a decade. Orange security signs were permanently posted outside tunnels or at bridges. Armed soldiers on guard might have been part of day-to-day life in downtown Tel Aviv, but they were never a part of the suburban American landscape prior to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Now they were a common sight everywhere from airports to train
stations to, in some cases, shopping malls. So it was entirely possible that civilians would have shrugged their shoulders and thought,
Sign of the times
, that something as benign as some government human services building required additional protection. After all, terrorists would attack anything that left itself open, and so maybe everything had to be guarded indiscriminately.

Indeed, the only thing that might have gotten a reaction from any passersby would have been the gorgeous Italian sports car that pulled into the HHS building and was promptly waved through by the guards. At most, though, they would have speculated that government payrolls needed to be trimmed if someone working in a low-level HHS job could afford a car quite so choice.

Once he was moving down the access road and was safe from the prying eyes of humans—or at least humans who might be stunned by the sight of a car turning into a robot—Mirage shifted into his preferred form, stretching his arms and legs as if he had been cramped inside a large suitcase. Ratchet, Bumblebee, Skids, and Mudflap were ahead of him down the road, having returned from a mission, and were likewise changing into their upright robotic bodies. They walked toward huge hangar doors, passing V-22 Osprey and Blackhawk helicopters, the sorts of vehicles that were not exactly standard issue in a government HHR building. Then again, if the Autobots were not capable of providing services for humanity’s health, who was?

Bumblebee heard the roar of an approaching motorcycle and turned to see Lennox rolling up. Lennox skidded the motorcycle to a halt and said, “We’ve got some company, Bee.” When Bumblebee didn’t respond, Lennox chuckled. “Wish
my
vocoder was damaged.”

“Senator,” came an angry female voice, “I suggest you
remember that when the NSA needs funding, they call me.” The voice was accompanied by a staccato clicking of heels, and seconds later a severely dressed woman strode across the floor with a phone pressed against her ear. She sported thick black glasses, and her hair was tied back. Bright red lipstick stood out against her pale complexion. She was wearing a gray pantsuit, blue shirt, and necktie. If she had looked any more severe, she would have come with a whip, silk ropes, and a safety word.

As she moved, she kicked off her high-heeled shoes and dropped a pair of sneakers in front of herself. She barely slowed as she slid her feet into them and kept talking without missing a beat. An aide who was running behind her picked up the heels and slid them into a bag as if he had done so a hundred times before. She didn’t seem to notice him.

“When the CIA’s gotta take out a target, they ask first for my permission. And when the president wants an opinion on what members of Congress are politically vulnerable in terms of undiscovered criminal conduct, mine is the number he dials. Because I keep a list. Right here in my pocket. And whenever I see it, it reminds me of you.” She paused then, and Lennox could hear the outraged bellowing of the person she was talking to coming through the phone. The reason Lennox could hear it was that the man was yelling so loudly that the woman had pulled the phone slightly away from her ear so that she wouldn’t go deaf. He was saying something about her not having any proof of her “outrageous calumnies.”

When he paused for breath, she slipped in quickly with, “Never use your own credit card, Senator.” That apparently silenced him, and she said confidently, “I look forward to your vote on the bill.”

With that final riposte, she snapped shut her cell
phone and then turned to Lennox. Clearly her mood wasn’t about to improve as she focused on the matters that had prompted her coming to the base. “He ‘demands’ to see me? He
demands
? It should be
me
demanding
him
! The CIA is up my ass about that mystery raid in the Middle East. So you better come clean. Was your unit involved?”

“Um … not sure, ma’am,” Lennox said, being evasive.

She was not amused. “As director of intelligence, I’m a real big fan of intelligent answers.”

“Can’t tell you definitively. Y’ know how teenage kids sometimes sneak out of the house at night.”

“Colonel Lennox.” What little patience she might have had was dwindling rapidly. “Are you in command or aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Lennox said as he continued walking toward their mutual subject of interest. “But aliens … they’re tricky. They work with us, not for us. Sometimes they just do what they think is best.”

“Stop with the ‘ma’am,’ ” she said in frustration. “Enough with the ‘ma’am.’ Do I
look
like a ma’am?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said out of reflex, and then took the time to process what she’d asked. “No, ma’am, I mean …”

There was a steady clanking as Wheeljack strode up to them. Lennox had never been more grateful for an interruption. Mirage and Ironhide were coming up behind him. “Oh, good, you’re here,” Wheeljack said. “I do hope you have answers for him. I’ve never seen him so upset.”

Mirage nodded in confirmation. “He won’t talk to me, to Ironhide, to anyone.”

Lennox and the newly arrived woman walked past them to Optimus Prime. He was in truck mode, with the alien artifact—the thing that he had informed Lennox
was a fuel rod of some kind—sitting on a pedestal in front of him.

“Optimus,” Lennox said, “you remember Charlotte Mearing, our director of national intelligence?”

No response. Lennox looked up at Wheeljack, who shrugged. It was odd to see such a human gesture being made by a gigantic alien robot. Then he realized that, no, the odd thing was that he was
talking to a gigantic alien robot
. It served to remind him of just how utterly out of whack his frame of reference had become.

As the lack of reply stretched into seconds, Mearing glanced at Ironhide. “What’s this, the alien silent treatment?”

“Seen that,” Ironhide said. “This is not that. This is worse.”

And suddenly, in a heartbeat—the fastest alteration Lennox had ever witnessed—Optimus Prime shifted from truck into robot and leaned straight in toward Mearing.
“You lied to us!”
he thundered, sounding angrier than Lennox had ever heard him short of when he was squaring off against a Decepticon trying to kill him. To underscore his fury, he kicked over the pedestal, sending the fuel rod clattering to the ground.

Mearing coolly glanced at the fallen pedestal. “Is that for effect?” she asked, not in the least nonplussed.

He pointed at it. “Everything humans know of our planet, we were told all had been shared. So why was this found in human possession?”

Lennox had once happened to fall into a poker game in which Mearing was involved. He had spent the next two hours getting utterly pounded and had resolved never to get pulled into another such endeavor because Mearing had nerves of steel and a poker face that made the Sphinx look scrutable. Those attributes were on full display now. “Optimus, I assure you, at Langley, the bureau, we were in the dark about this,” she said so
smoothly that Lennox could not have told whether she was being honest or not. It sure sounded like she was on the up and up, though. “It was director-only clearance at Sector Seven until now …”

She signaled to an aide who had been remaining at a respectful distance but now hurried forward upon receiving her slightly sardonic instruction, “Please bring me my bag that contains the worst information known to mankind.”

The aide came forward, and there were three men accompanying him. None of them was young. Lennox recognized only one of them, but when he did, he drew in a sharp breath and fought the impulse to genuflect.

As they approached, Mearing said, “This was a secret few men knew. And fewer still remain alive.”

One of the approaching old men was looking at Optimus with a guarded expression, and Lennox could decipher it immediately: He was trying to assess whether the robot presented a threat. The other two men, however, were regarding the Autobot with expressions that conveyed both reverence and camaraderie.

“Optimus Prime,” Mearing said as the elderly men approached, “this is Doctor Johnson, an early mission director. This is Bruce McCandless II, former astronaut who was CAPCOM for the first mission to the moon. And this is Buzz Aldrin, one of the first two men to set foot on the moon.”

“From a fellow space explorer to another, it’s an honor,” said Aldrin.

“The honor is mine,” Optimus replied.

Lennox felt a brief wave of relief. At least Optimus wasn’t so pissed off with them that he wasn’t attending to simple social graces.

McCandless spoke up. “I can fully understand your anger about being kept in the dark, sir,” he said to Optimus.
“I was initially kept out of the loop as well,” and he cast an annoyed look at Johnson.

“Out of what loop?” said Optimus Prime.

Clearly irritated that she was discovering something this momentous so long after the fact, Mearing said, “Our entire space race of the 1960s, it appears, was in response to an … event.”

“We were sworn to secrecy by our commander in chief,” Aldrin said. “Our mission was for mankind and science, yes. But there was also a military component, which is where Doctor Johnson came in, being a military astrophysicist. Our mission was to investigate a crashed alien ship. Its cargo hold was empty, as near as we could tell, presuming it
was
a cargo hold. No survivors aboard.”

“The Soviets managed to land unmanned probes,” Johnson said. “Must’ve somehow picked up that fuel rod.”

Mearing’s aide had produced a small DVD player that he handed to her. She held it up, opened it, and pressed play. A grainy video began to play on it, showing scientists hard at work.

“This is security video obtained by Mossad in ’86, which we’ve transferred over onto DVD,” she said. “Apparently it was being fed into a remote location, for reasons that will quickly become obvious. We believe the Russians deduced the rod was a fissionable fuel assembly, believed they had mastered it, and tried to harness it at Chernobyl.”

On the small monitor, the Soviet scientists were throwing a switch. Instantly gauges spiked with a rising whine, and the scientists were patting each other on the back in mutual congratulations. That lasted for all of five seconds before they clearly realized that they had set events into motion that were going to be cataclysmically horrific. They scrambled to shut it down, and absurdly,
Lennox wondered if they were going to make it. Then the screen went blindingly white.

“Obviously,” Mearing said drily, not in the least caught up in the tragedy that she had just witnessed, “not the best use of judgment. The Russian ministry, of course, disavows this incident ever occurred.”