The Shimmer

1

From fifteen hundred feet off the ground, the blue pickup truck looked like a Matchbox toy. Normally it would have blended with traffic, but on this clear Tuesday afternoon in early June, the pilot watched the truck race past other vehicles and veer back and forth between lanes as the driver searched for any open space he could find.

The aircraft, a Cessna 172, had high wings and a single propeller. Its pilot was a forty-year-old police officer named Dan Page. He knew that the driver of the pickup was male because he monitored a police radio through his headphones and was aware that ten minutes earlier the man had shot and killed another man in a feud between drug dealers at Fort Marcy Park. A police officer driving by saw the shooting. When he sped into the park, the assailant fired through the cruiser’s windshield and killed him. Park workers who saw the murders all identified the shooter as a thin, twentyish Anglo with a shaved head and a white T-shirt, the short sleeves of which revealed a large tattoo on his left arm.

This was Page’s day off. A private pilot, he enjoyed flying his Cessna from Santa Fe ’s small airport and, as he phrased it, “getting above it all.” But when his police radio transmitted news of the chase, he headed over the four-mile-wide city to where the truck had last been seen, hoping to spot it among Santa Fe ’s low buildings and provide directions to his fellow officers in the pursuing police cars. Five minutes later, he had it in sight. The truck’s frantic, random route would have been difficult to follow on the ground but was obvious from the air.

“He’s going east on Peralta,” Page said into the microphone on his headset. “Now he’s turning right onto Guadalupe, heading downtown.”

“I’m five blocks in front of him,” another officer’s voice answered quickly. “I can cut him off.”

“Wait. Now he’s veering onto Agua Fria.”

Page stared down helplessly as an oncoming car swerved out of the truck’s way, lurched onto a sidewalk, and hit an adobe wall, earthen bricks cascading onto the hood. He imagined the sound of the crash, the violence somehow gaining in magnitude because of the distance.

“He’s back on Saint Francis Drive,” Page warned.

“If he’s headed toward the interstate, we’ve got the ramps blocked,” an urgent voice replied.

Again the truck abruptly changed direction.

“He’s turning right onto Cerrillos Road,” Page yelled.

“I’ll intercept him at Cordova!” a different voice blurted.

Peering down toward a crosswalk, Page noticed pedestrians scurrying to avoid the truck. A car was forced off the road.

“Too late! He’s past Cordova!”

“We’ll set up a roadblock at Saint Michael’s Drive.”

“Better make it Rodeo Road! He’s driving so fast, you won’t have time at Saint Michael’s!”

Indeed, the speed with which the truck covered distance was astounding. The other vehicles on Cerrillos Road seemed to be standing still.

My God, he’s got to be doing over a hundred, Page thought.

Other drivers must have seen the truck speeding toward them in their rearview mirrors, or maybe the fugitive kept blowing his horn. For whatever reason, traffic veered out of the way.

“We’ve got the intersection at Cerrillos and Rodeo Road closed!” a voice shouted.

Immediately the truck swerved onto another side street.

Page finally understood the pattern. “I think he’s got a police radio!”

“What?”

“He changes directions whenever you tell me you’ve got a street blocked! He must be listening to us! Now he’s turning into the Lowe’s parking lot!”

Customers leaving the huge hardware store darted to the side as the truck sped toward the movie theater at the end of the lot. It disappeared into a parking garage.

Circling, Page watched for a man in a white T-shirt to leave the garage and try to get away on foot. But in June, a lot of men wore T-shirts, and from this altitude, it was almost impossible to distinguish colors on clothing. Moreover, the color might be irrelevant-the driver could force someone in the garage to give him a different-colored shirt so he could walk away without attracting attention.

Page kept circling.

A car left the garage.

He watched the tiny figures of pedestrians proceeding toward the theater’s entrance. He looked for anyone whose pace was hurried.

An SUV left the garage.

He can change vehicles as easily as he can put on another shirt, Page realized.

A sports car left the garage.

From above, Page kept track of all three vehicles and described them to the officers on the ground. The first one reached a lane that took it to the left toward Cerrillos Road. The SUV reached the same lane and turned in the opposite direction, toward a side street. The sports car headed back toward the parking lot in front of the hardware store.

Three different directions.

Meanwhile, the pursuing police cars converged on the area. Page saw their flashing roof lights and imagined the wail of their sirens.

No other vehicles came from the garage. At the hardware store parking lot, a police cruiser stopped the sports car. Page switched his view toward the first vehicle that had left the garage. It was stopped at the entrance to Cerrillos Road, unable to find a break in traffic. In contrast, the SUV faced no obstacles as it drove leisurely in the opposite direction, along the lane toward the side street.

Page had a hunch and followed it. He descended a hundred feet, doing nothing drastic, nothing the FAA would object to, but even so, the downward motion made his engine grow louder.

The SUV seemed to drive a little faster.

He descended another hundred feet, making his engine sound even more insistent.

The SUV increased speed.

“He’s below me, in the SUV!” Page yelled into the microphone, testing his theory by flying another hundred feet lower and trying to provoke a response.

He got one. The vehicle surged forward and skidded onto the side street.

“He’s heading toward Airport Road!”

The SUV swung onto the multilane road and zigzagged through traffic, its speed so reckless that cars swerved to get out of the way. Two of them crashed against each other. Each time the vehicle abruptly changed lanes, it rocked a little-not as stable as the truck had been.

Page glanced farther along Airport Road, gaping at a gasoline truck that emerged from a service station. Oh, my God…

When the SUV changed lanes again, the abrupt motion caused it to lean. Instead of tipping, it managed to jolt back onto all four wheels. But as the driver tried to find an open space in another lane, he must have yanked the steering wheel. The vehicle tilted more severely, balanced on two wheels, fell all the way over, and crashed onto its side.

Throwing up a shower of sparks, it slid along the road.

No!

The SUV hit the tanker, tore a gash underneath, and burst into flames as the sparks ignited the gasoline cascading from the fuel truck’s belly.

A fireball swelled upward. Banking from it, Page felt the shock wave. It took several moments before he could make his voice work and radio for an emergency team. Dark smoke drifted past him.

2

The debriefing room consisted of metal chairs arranged in rows before a blackboard. Overhead, fluorescent lights hummed and made everyone look pale as the police chief listened to their reports. Page glanced through a window and saw several television broadcast trucks in the police station’s parking lot.

“Okay, you told me what you did right. Now, how about what you did wrong?” the chief demanded. “That press conference is in fifteen minutes. I don’t want any surprises.”

“We weren’t chasing him,” one of the officers, Angelo, insisted. “We never endangered any civilians. All we did was try to get ahead of him and cut him off.”

“Right,” another man, Rafael, added. “Even though the bastard shot Bobby, we didn’t overreact.”

“He was driving a hundred miles an hour,” an officer named Vera said. “It’s a miracle the only other driver he killed was the poor guy behind the wheel of that gasoline tanker.”

The chief looked in Page’s direction.

“How about you?”

Page tried not to imagine the agony of the tanker’s driver.

“With the state police helicopter in the hangar for maintenance, the only aircraft available for police use was mine. I warned the air- port traffic controller to advise other planes not to fly over the city. I stayed above the minimum required altitude. No FAA regulations were broken. Nobody was at risk.”

The chief swept his gaze across the group. “Anybody have anything to add? Any screw-up I should know about?”

The group was silent.

“Then I’m ready to talk to the reporters.”

The officers looked relieved.

Page hung back as they all rose and began to leave the room.

“Want to join us for a beer?” Angelo asked.

“As soon as I tell my wife I’m okay,” Page answered. He didn’t need to ask where they’d meet. They always went to the same place-a sports bar on Carrillo’s Road.

Once he was alone in the debriefing room, he used his cell phone to call home. It was the fourth time he’d done so since landing-and the fourth time he’d heard his own voice saying, “Please leave a message.”

He tried Tori’s cell phone, and for the fourth time it was her voice saying, “Please leave a message.”

Yet again he said into the phone, “Hey, it’s me. Call me when you get this.”

He glanced at his watch, the digital display of which showed 7:23. Where is she? he wondered.

3

Turning into the driveway of his single-story home, Page pressed the garage-door opener that was attached to his SUV’s sun visor. As the door swung upward, he saw that Tori’s Saturn wasn’t there. He drove in, turned off the engine, got out of his Grand Cherokee, and closed the garage door.

Entering the shadowy kitchen, he noticed how quiet the house felt.

A note lay on the table.

Gone to see my mother.

This made Page frown because Tori’s mother lived in San Antonio, Texas, eight hundred miles away, and Tori hadn’t said a word about wanting to visit her mother. What on earth could have caused her to make such a spur-of-the-moment trip? he wondered.

The only explanation he could think of was, Some kind of emergency. She got a phone call with terrible news from her mother-no, about her mother-so she bought a last-minute plane ticket and hurried down to Albuquerque.

The state’s only big airport was in Albuquerque. The drive down from Santa Fe took an hour and fifteen minutes. Normally Page and Tori used his plane when they visited her mother. But because he’d been flying and couldn’t answer his cell phone, Tori hadn’t been able to tell him what had happened.

Sure. That makes sense, Page thought.

Nonetheless, he couldn’t help rubbing his forehead.

Even if I wasn’t able to answer my phone, that wouldn’t have pre- vented her from leaving a message.

The kitchen phone hung on a wall next to the fridge. Page went over to it, looked at a list taped to the side, found the number he wanted, and pressed the buttons. He expected to get the answering machine, but an elderly voice answered.

“Hello?”

“Margaret? Is that you?”

Page didn’t talk to Tori’s mother often, but she recognized his voice.

“Of course it’s me, Dan. Why do you sound so surprised?”

“I didn’t think you’d be answering. I just assumed you were sick… or something.”

“Sick? What would give you that idea?”

“I came home and found a note from Tori saying she’d gone to visit you. It’s so spur-of-the-moment-I mean, when I left this morning she didn’t say a word about going-I assumed something serious had happened. That you’d been in an accident or something like that. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Well, I’m tired from working in the garden all afternoon. Other- wise I feel fine. When Tori called and said she was coming to see me, I was as surprised as you.”

Page tightened his grip on the phone. “She called you? When?”

“This morning around ten.”

As soon as I left to go to the airport, he thought. Tori was a real estate agent. She often spent the morning at home, writing offers or making phone calls.

Page did some quick calculations. There wasn’t a direct flight between Albuquerque and San Antonio. Tori would have needed to catch a connecting flight in Dallas. Door to door, the whole trip usually took about seven hours. Depending on when her flight left, she should be in San Antonio by now, he thought.

“Is she there? I’d like to talk to her.”

“No, I don’t expect her for several more hours,” the elderly voice replied. “Maybe not until tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Confusion made Page’s head start to ache. “She must be on a really late flight.”

“She’s not flying.”

That didn’t sound right. “Not flying? But then how… Are you telling me she’s driving?”

“That’s what she said. It didn’t make any sense to me, either. Eight hundred miles-but that’s what she told me she wanted to do. You really didn’t know about this?”

“Nothing. Not a damned thing.”

“I asked her why she was driving. She answered that she wanted to see the countryside and think. But she didn’t say what was on her mind. Dan, I don’t know another way to ask this. Is everything okay between Tori and you?”

His impulse was to blurt, Absolutely. We get along fine. Things couldn’t be better.

But the words stuck in his throat.

He forced out a different answer. “All she needed to do was tell me she wanted to visit you. I might even have gone with her. She didn’t have to keep it a secret. If she drives straight through and gets there tonight, tell her to call me as soon as she arrives. I don’t care how late it is.”

“Count on me. I’ll ask her.”

“Not just ask her, Margaret. Please, make sure she does it. Put the phone in her hand and make sure she calls me.”

4

After he hung up, Page studied the kitchen. Tori had put the breakfast dishes away. The kitchen counters were bare, and everything was in its place, just as if the house were ready for a real estate showing.

He moved into the living room. Magazines that had been spread across the coffee table were neatly stacked. Cushions that had been in disarray from when he and Tori had watched television the previous night were back in their proper places. He remembered that she hadn’t watched TV for long, that she’d gone to bed early, saying she wanted to read.

He walked down the hallway and peered into Tori’s office. Her lap- top computer was gone. Apart from a lamp, nothing was on her desk.

He entered their bedroom. The bed was made, everything perfectly arranged. Looking in the closet, he discovered that two suit- cases were missing. He studied the empty hangers and concluded that Tori had taken most of her casual clothes but none of her business outfits. He checked her bureau drawers and discovered that all her socks and underwear were gone. He glanced toward her side of the bed. A compulsive reader, she normally kept a dozen books stacked there.

All of those were also gone.

Page didn’t move for quite a while. When he became aware of the gathering darkness outside, he went into the living room and sat in shadows.

5

Waking with a start on Wednesday morning, Page turned toward the terrible emptiness on Tori’s side of the bed. He stared at it for several troubled moments, then quickly got into some jeans, went outside, and grabbed the newspaper from the sidewalk, hurrying back so he wouldn’t fail to hear the telephone. But it didn’t ring.

The newspaper’s headline announced, SHOOTING LEADS TO CHASE AND TANKER EXPLOSION. A photograph showed Bobby in his uniform. Another showed the truck driver. A third showed the twisted metal of the SUV and the gasoline tanker after the intense blaze had fused them together.

Page turned the newspaper over, hiding the photographs.

Unable to wait any longer, he picked up the phone and pressed numbers.

“Margaret, it’s Dan.”

She responded without any of the ordinary pleasantries: “Tori isn’t here yet.”

Page’s throat felt terribly dry. After swallowing, he managed to speak. “She must have gotten tired and spent the night in a motel.” Even as he said it, he didn’t believe it.

“Then why didn’t she call to tell me not to worry? Which is exactly what I’m doing.” The elderly voice quavered. “What if she had an accident?”

“I don’t think that’s likely, or I’d have heard something.” Page tried to sound convincing. “But I’ll see what I can find out.”

Three hours later, en route to investigate a high school stabbing, he received a call from the duty officer at the police station.

“There’s no record that Tori was in a traffic accident either in New Mexico or Texas, and nothing about her being admitted to any hospital along the route she was driving.”

Page breathed out in relief, but he knew what the report meant and what he was forced to do next-he didn’t see another option.

“Put out a missing-person report.”

6

Early Thursday morning, the phone rang. Page set down his coffee cup and grabbed the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Dan Page?” a man’s voice asked. It had a Southern accent and a raspy tone, as if it belonged to a smoker.

“Speaking.” Page realized how tightly he held the phone.

“This is Police Chief Roger Costigan in Rostov, Texas.”

“Where?” Page’s mind swirled. He reached for a pen.

“Rostov, Texas. We’re southeast of El Paso, about fifty miles from the Mexican border.”

Page felt a knot in his stomach. “You found my wife?”

“Victoria Page,” the voice said, as if reading from a list. “Caucasian. Five foot six. One hundred and twenty pounds. Red hair. Green eyes. Driving a dark-blue 2008 Saturn Outlook.” The voice gave the license number.

“That’s her.” Page’s brow felt cold.

“One of my officers spotted her car at the side of a road early this morning. He found her nearby.”

Page had the sensation of holding his breath. “Is she…?”

“She’s fine. You don’t need to worry on that score. She hasn’t been hurt. She wasn’t in any danger.”

“No accident?”

“No, sir.”

“She hasn’t been injured?”

“That’s correct, Mr. Page. She’s just fine.”

Thank God, Page thought. But troubling questions immediately flooded through him.

“If she wasn’t injured, then why was her car at the side of the road?”

“That’s difficult to explain.”

“I don’t understand. Is she there? Can you put her on the phone?”

“No, sir. She isn’t with me.”

“Then how can I talk to her?”

“I guess that’s up to her,” the voice replied. “We told her you’re looking for her, but she didn’t react.”

“You’re not making sense. Is she alone?”

“As much as I can tell.”

“Then what in God’s name is she doing in…” Page looked at the note he’d made. “Rostov, Texas?”

“It’s a little complicated. You’ll understand better if I tell you in person. The main thing is, no law’s been broken. She’s here of her own free will.”

“You say it’s better if you tell me in person?”

“Maybe ‘show you’ would be more accurate.”

“Why are you being so damned cryptic, Chief?”

“I’m not trying to be. Believe me, this is an unusual situation. I’m afraid I can’t explain it over the phone. You’ll just have to see for yourself.”

“Whatever the hell is going on, you can expect to show me this afternoon.”

“Mr. Page, I’m afraid you’ll need a lot longer than that to get here. You’re in Santa Fe, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, our nearest major airport is in El Paso, and we’re a couple of hundred miles from there. There’s no way you can get here by this afternoon.”

“Do you have any airport at all?”

“There’s a little one that the ranchers use, but…”

“Then I’ll see you at five o’clock.”

7

Page phoned the police station and told the duty officer that he couldn’t come to work that day and probably wouldn’t be in until Monday. He packed a suitcase, grabbed his flight bag, and drove to Santa Fe’s small airport. After carrying his luggage into a reception area, he said hello to a young woman behind a counter. She had the newspaper sitting on the counter in front of her, but before she could mention the front-page article, he turned left into a computer lounge, where he studied reports of the weather in New Mexico and Texas. The forecasts indicated a chance for thunderstorms in a couple of days but no immediate problems.

The last thing he always did was look for announcements about prohibited areas. These warned pilots about airspace they weren’t al- lowed to enter, often because of security issues. A pilot who trespassed into a forbidden area was liable to find his or her plane flanked by fighter jets giving angry orders to land at the nearest airfield.

There weren’t any flight restrictions in New Mexico, but Page was surprised to discover that the Rostov area of Texas did have one. Puzzled, he clicked a button to get more information and learned that the prohibition involved an array of radio astronomy dishes twenty miles northwest of the town. The concern wasn’t related to national security. Rather, the observatory was off-limits because planes flying over the dishes were liable to cause electrical interference that blocked at- tempts to collect radio signals from astronomical phenomena such as solar flares and spiral galaxies.

Fine-I’ll just stay away from it, Page thought.

He pulled charts from his flight bag and quickly plotted a course to Rostov. As Chief Costigan had told him, the town was a couple of hundred miles southeast of El Paso. Nowhere near San Antonio.

His emotions in turmoil, Page stepped through a door onto the airport’s tie-down area. There, in warm sunlight, numerous small aircraft were secured to the concrete by ropes attached to their wings and tails. One of them was Page’s Cessna. Feeling the pressure of time, he warned himself to slow down as he inspected the plane’s exterior. After each flight, he always had the fuel tanks filled. Now he drained a small amount of fuel into a cup to assure himself that there weren’t any water bubbles or other contaminants.

Stay focused, he told himself.

After untying the plane, he got inside, attached his maps and flight plan to a clipboard strapped to his thigh, and took a deep breath.

Pay attention, he thought. No matter how much I want to reach Tori, what matters now is the plane. Pay attention to flying the plane.

He took another deep breath and went through his preflight checklist.

What in God’s name is Tori doing in Rostov, Texas?

He used his radio to ask the ground controller for permission to taxi to the takeoff area. Five minutes later-less than two hours after he’d received the phone call from Chief Costigan-he was in the air, flying to Texas.

8

The man with the M4 carbine stood in the shade of the small concrete-block building and savored the last of his cigarette. The temperature was a pleasant, dry 85 degrees, but habits from his two tours of duty in Iraq stayed with him, and he avoided direct sunlight as much as possible.

Because it was midmorning and the sun was on the opposite side of the tiny building, Earl Halloway wasn’t able to enjoy the rugged majesty of the Davis Mountains to the north. Instead his view consisted of seemingly endless clumps of sparse brown grass.

Tumbleweeds stuck to a chain-link fence fifty yards from him. The fence was twelve feet high and topped by barbed wire. Signs along it declared:

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AREA

NO ADMITTANCE

To Halloway’s left, nine huge radio observatory dishes were pointed in various directions toward the sky, and another was tilted so that it pointed horizontally. It had a truck next to it, along with scaffolding and a small crane, as if it were undergoing repairs. The dishes could be seen from quite a distance, a conspicuous intrusion on the landscape.

At the road ten miles away, a similar warning sign was attached to a locked gate that prevented access to the lane. People who stopped their cars to stare toward the far-off dishes usually lingered for only a short time until boredom prompted them to resume their journey.

The chain-link fence was one of three around the dishes. It wasn’t electrified-nobody at the installation wanted the nuisance of dealing with ranchers whose cattle happened to wander up to the fence and get barbecued. Even so, there had never been a case of anyone being foolish enough to climb it. The second fence was constructed entirely of razor wire, and the third fence was electrified, its numerous prominent signs warning, DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE!

Halloway could have sat in an air-conditioned security room and watched monitors that would show any intruder’s futile attempt to get over the third fence. If such a thing ever happened, he and the other guards would go out afterward to clean up the mess. No smoking was permitted in the sterile facility, so his cigarette break was the only reason he ever needed to step outside. He justified his addiction by telling himself that cameras and monitors were no substitute for eyeballing the landscape in person to make sure everything was as peaceful as it seemed. After all, one of his fellow Army Rangers in Iraq had been a sniper who could disguise himself so well that an enemy could walk across a field and not know the sniper was there un- less the enemy stepped on him.

This line of thought made Halloway uncomfortable. All he’d wanted was a peaceful smoke, and now he’d gotten himself brooding about snipers. Time to get back inside, he decided. After taking a final satisfying drag from his cigarette, he dropped it to the ground, crushed it with his boot, and gave the bleak vista a final assessment.

Twenty miles to the southeast was a town called Rostov, but he’d never been to it-no one from the facility had ever been there. It was strictly off-limits. We don’t want them thinking about us, he’d been told emphatically when he’d signed on for what was supposed to be easy duty.

But after three months of being confined here, Holloway couldn’t wait for his replacement to arrive-an event that was set to occur in just two weeks. Sure, the food was better than what he’d been given in Iraq. Plus the installation had alcohol, which he hadn’t been able to get in Iraq. He couldn’t complain about the Internet downloads of the latest movies, some of which weren’t yet available on DVD.

But what he really wanted was to get laid.

Thinking again about snipers, he tapped the security-code buttons on a pad next to the entrance. When he heard a buzz that indicated the lock had been freed, he opened the metal door and stepped in- side. Immediately the observatory’s filtered, cooled, sterile air encircled him. He shoved the heavy door back into place, making sure the electronic lock engaged. Then he unlocked a secondary door, stepped through, secured that one as well, and descended metal stairs that ended at a long corridor lit by a row of overhead lights.

9

The underground facility was large. A subtle vibration filled it.

When Halloway had arrived three months earlier, he’d thought nothing of the vibration, but as the days had accumulated, he’d be- come increasingly sensitive to the faint, omnipresent hum that he suspected had something to do with the installation’s electrical generator-or else with the activity of the huge radio dishes. No one else seemed aware of it, but for him it had become distracting enough that, even though he’d taken to wearing earplugs when he went to bed, he wasn’t able to sleep soundly.

He passed two doors on the left and turned right into a large room filled with numerous closed-circuit television monitors that showed every approach to the installation. The images were in color and displayed excellent definition. At night they had a green tint as heat sensors registered the difference between the rapidly cooling grassland and the constant temperature of animals or human beings.

His counterpart on this shift, a man with large, strong hands, sat in a metal chair and flipped through a sports magazine, occasionally glancing at the screens. It was poor discipline, but after months of in- activity, Halloway understood how hard it was to keep staring at those damned monitors.

“Smoking’s bad for your health,” the man said without looking up. His name was Taggard.

“So’s getting shot at. I figured a bullet was more to worry about than a cigarette.”

“This isn’t Iraq.”

“Thanks for the geography lesson. Putting on weight isn’t good for you, either, but that hasn’t stopped you from mainlining those candy bars you keep in your desk. How many do you eat a day? Ten? Fifteen?”

Taggard chuckled. With so little to do, they’d taken to ribbing each other constantly. “Yeah, I really ought to be on the Stairmaster instead of reading these magazines. I’ll get on that first thing tomorrow.”

“I’m going to take a leak,” Halloway said.

“After that, maybe you could sit here a while and let me wander around.”

Now it was Halloway’s turn to chuckle.

He stepped back out into the corridor and went farther along. On the left, an open door was marked DATA ANALYSIS. Through the opening, he heard static and peered in at a bored, bald, bespectacled researcher who studied a computer screen. All kinds of electronic equipment occupied the numerous shelves that lined the walls around the room. Red indicator lights glowed, and needles pulsed. One device provided a visual depiction of the static, which looked like chaotically shifting dots. The sound was harsh and brittle and re- minded Halloway of a radio searching for a hard-to-find station.

Which is pretty much what’s going on, he concluded.

The subtle vibration intensified, giving Halloway the start of a headache.

“It sounds a little different than yesterday,” he said, causing the man with the glasses to look up.

“Hello, Earl,” the researcher answered. “Yes, there’s more activity, and it’s getting louder. There’s been a general increase all week.”

“What do you figure is going on?”

“Probably nothing. Sometimes the static seems to be accumulating toward something. Then it backs off. According to the computer, that’s been the rhythm ever since this observatory was built fifteen years ago.” The researcher turned toward a sequence of knobs. “I’ll realign the dish and see if the pattern gains any definition. Monitoring local ambient electrical discharge is a good way to see if the equipment’s functioning properly.”

Halloway was aware that the dish the scientist referred to was the one tilted toward the horizon, as if undergoing repairs. He had no doubt, however, that the dish was pointed exactly where it was sup- posed to be-southeast, toward an area near Rostov.

In theory, the dishes gathered radio pulses from deep space and coordinated them. A lot of heavenly bodies generated them, the researcher had explained, and a lot were still echoing from the Big Bang. A complex computer program translated the signals into images that looked like photographs, depicting nebulae, novas, black holes, and other astronomical wonders.

Halloway hadn’t known what any of that meant when he’d arrived at the installation three months earlier, but the sameness of each day had bored the researcher enough that he was happy to explain how a radio observatory worked. Despite the explanations, Halloway had no illusions about what was really going on. A radio observatory didn’t need razor wire and high-voltage fences. The M4 with which he and the other guards were equipped was one of the best assault carbines on the planet, complete with a grenade launcher and a laser sighting system. That was a hell of a lot of security to protect a facility that studied black holes.

Even before a helicopter had transported him to this remote area of west Texas, Halloway had been convinced that this felt like a spook operation rather than a project for the National Science Foundation. Within days of his arrival, he’d seen enough to use his laptop to Google information about how radio observatories could be employed by espionage agencies. He’d become convinced that the dishes above this huge bunker weren’t pointed at nebulae, novas, and black holes. They were aimed at satellites that scooped radio signals from the atmosphere.

They were also aimed at the moon. Radio signals all over the world “leaked” into outer space, his Internet research had informed him. The moon intercepted many of those signals, however, and a properly focused radio observatory could collect them as they bounced back to Earth. By sorting through the various frequencies and choosing those favored by major terrorist organizations or foreign governments hostile to the United States, a facility like this could relay valuable information to intelligence analysts in places such as Fort Meade, near Washington, D.C.

Halloway hadn’t picked that location at random. Fort Meade, he knew, was the headquarters of the National Security Agency. Yes, this was a damned spook operation, he was sure of it, but if the technician-whose name was Gordon-wanted to keep lying, claiming it was a scientific project that mapped deep space, Halloway was fine with that. The little game they played was about the only thing that interested him. That and the mystery of why one dish was aimed horizontally toward Rostov. The technician could jabber all he wanted to about “monitoring local ambient electrical discharge.”

Give me a fucking break, Halloway thought. Something’s going on near Rostov, and a lot of this billion-dollar facility is being used to try to figure out what it is.

10

Page landed midroute at the airport outside Roswell, New Mexico. The sun-baked area was where the American UFO craze had begun in 1947, when a rancher had discovered debris from a large fallen object that the military described first as a flying disc and then as a weather bal- loon. The different explanations may simply have been an example of flawed communication, but conspiracy theorists had seized on those differences to claim a government cover-up. Ever since then, Roswell had become the unofficial UFO capital of the world, so much so that every Fourth of July the town had a UFO Festival where skeptics and so-called experts debated while actors from science fiction movies signed autographs and enthusiasts dressed up as “little green men.”

Page and Tori had flown to the festival a few years earlier and enjoyed the carnival atmosphere of the parades, the costume contest, and the concerts, one of which had featured a band interpreting music from Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon. They rarely found opportunities to vacation together-his job was too demanding-and he remembered how she had laughed as they watched a group of “Klingons” earnestly performing a wedding ceremony.

The bittersweet memory made Page feel even more anxious to reach Tori. He watched as a fuel truck filled his plane’s tanks. He verified that the fuel had the correct color-blue-for the type he needed and that there weren’t any contaminants. Then he climbed back into the plane, took off, and continued southeast.

His carefully chosen route allowed him to follow a corridor that passed among large military areas to the north, east, south, and west. These were boldly marked on his aerial map and indicated where fighter jets practiced combat maneuvers. Farther west an even more serious military area was located over the White Sands Missile Range, formerly known as the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, where the first atomic bomb had been detonated in 1945.

The rugged vista was breathtaking. Nonpilots often assumed that the appeal of flying involved appreciating the scenery. But Page had become a pilot because he enjoyed the sensation of moving in three dimensions. The truth was that maintaining altitude and speed while staying on course, monitoring radio transmissions, and comparing a sectional map to actual features on the ground required so much concentration that a pilot had little time for sightseeing.

There was another element to flying, though, and it was a lot like the drinking that took place at after-shift decompression sessions with his fellow officers. Page enjoyed flying because it helped him not to think about the terrible pain people inflicted on one another. He’d seen too many lives destroyed by guns, knives, beer bottles, screw- drivers, baseball bats, and even a nail gun. Six months earlier, he’d been the first officer to arrive at the scene of a car accident in which a drunken driver had hit an oncoming vehicle and killed five children along with the woman who was taking them to a birthday party. There’d been so much blood that Page still had nightmares about it.

His friends thought he was joking when he said the reward of flying was “getting above it all,” but he was serious. The various activities involved in controlling an aircraft shut out what he was determined not to remember.

That helped Page now. His confusion, his urgency, his need to have answers-on the ground, these emotions had thrown him off balance, but once he was in the air, the discipline of controlling the Cessnaforced him to feel as level as the aircraft. In the calm sky, amid the monotonous, muffled drone of the engine, the plane created a floating sensation. He welcomed it yet couldn’t help dreading what he might discover on the ground. When he entered Texas, the Davis Mountains extended to his left as far as he could see. They were hardly typical of the rest of the state and in fact reminded him of the aspen- and pinon-covered peaks he was accustomed to seeing in New Mexico.

He monitored the radio frequency for the Rostov airport. He knew from his preflight research that there wasn’t a control tower and that he needed to broadcast his intentions directly to any aircraft that might be in the vicinity to make certain no flight paths intersected. During his long approach, he heard from only one other pilot, a woman with a deep Texas accent who reported that she was heading in the opposite direction.

The aerial map made clear where the prohibited airspace of the observatory was located, but even without a map, Page couldn’t have missed the installation. The large white dishes reflected the sun and were awesome to behold. They resembled giant versions of the satellite dish on the roof of his Santa Fe home. Incongruous with the flat landscape in which they were situated, they radiated a feeling of sheer power that made them appear huge, even when seen from a distance.

He was puzzled that the observatory was located on comparatively low ground, especially when compared to the distant mountains. Didn’t observatories work best when placed at as high an altitude as possible? But his musings came to an end when the practical concerns inherent to flying replaced his curiosity. Careful to stay clear of the dishes, he continued along his course toward Rostov.

Small communities were usually hard to spot from the air, and Rostov was no exception, blending with the seemingly boundless ranchland that stretched everywhere. For a moment, Page felt an eerie sense that he’d been here before, that he’d flown over this exact area on an earlier occasion and had seen these same cattle spread out, grazing. He was particularly struck by a picturesque windmill next to a pond at which cattle drank, a view he was positive he’d seen before. But he’d never before been in this area of Texas.

This just happens to look like a place you’ve flown over in another part of the country, he told himself. Pay attention to what you’re doing.

His map revealed railway tracks and a road that went through Rostov. Flying parallel to the road-which was easier to spot-he soon noticed a faint cluster of low buildings ahead.

The map indicated that the airport was three miles northeast of the town, but as it came into view and Page prepared to angle in that direction, he felt confused when a second airstrip appeared on the opposite side of town, to the southeast. It wasn’t marked on the map. Flying lower by that time, he was able to take a closer look, and he saw that the runway was cracked and buckled, a lot of it covered with dirt, patches of weeds and cactus growing at random. The crumbled ruins of hangars lay next to it. Lots of hangars, he noticed curiously. Many years ago, this had been a sizable facility.

What happened to it? Page wondered.

He noticed something else: an unusual topographical feature that stretched beyond the decayed airstrip. There, contrasting with the rugged brown grassland, was an extensive area of what looked like huge black cinders, seemingly evidence of volcanic activity that eons ago had pushed subterranean debris to the surface. The cinders had formed the rim of a volcanic crater that had eroded over time until only half of it remained visible, barely rising above the surface of the surrounding land.

Whenever the eruption had occurred, the force of it had scattered chunks everywhere. Page had seen other areas like it while flying over Arizona. They were generally called “badlands,” a fitting name for something so bleak and forbidding. He couldn’t help concluding that the place looked the way he felt.

Increasingly eager to find Tori, he flew from the ruined, uncharted airfield toward the airport that was marked on the map. Again the precision of what he needed to do was the only thing he could allow to occupy his mind. After radioing his intention to land and checking where the windsock was pointed, he reduced the engine’s power and glided downward. When he came within a wingspan of the center line on the airstrip, he leveled the plane, felt it float, sensed it begin to settle, eased back on the yoke, and touched down gently on the two main wheels, letting the nose wheel ease down on its own, protecting the strut that supported it.

He taxied to a tie-down area next to a building that looked like an old gas station, except that there weren’t any pumps in front of it. In- stead the fuel was kept in a small tanker truck. He quickly shut out the memory of the tanker that he’d seen explode in Santa Fe just a few days earlier. Off to the side, a hangar had its doors open, revealing a helicopter and a Lear jet. Their presence in this small community might have been puzzling if not for the fact that this was Texas cattle country. Four propeller-driven aircraft were tied down, all more powerful and expensive than Page’s Cessna, another indicator of wealth.

Climbing out of the cockpit, he secured the plane and pulled his bags from the rear seat, but now that his obligation to the aircraft had ended, he found that he couldn’t walk. His muscles seemed paralyzed as confusion escaped from the tight mental compartment into which he’d temporarily been able to shut it away. He was no longer above everything. He didn’t have a half-dozen things to accomplish in order to control the plane. At once the pressure of the past two days flooded through him again.

Why did Tori leave without telling me?

What’s she doing here?

What the hell’s going on?

Despite the apprehension that seized him, Page managed to force his legs to work and carried his bags across the hot pavement. The building that reminded him of an old gas station had adobe walls and a corrugated metal roof, the rust on which suggested that the structure dated back many years.

Opening a squeaky screen door, he entered a small reception area that held a battered wooden table and a scuffed leather sofa. A candy machine stood next to a water cooler and a phone that hung on the wall. Another doorway led to an office on the right, from which a heavy, gray-haired man of about sixty appeared. He wore frayed mechanic’s coveralls and used a rag to wipe grease from his fingers. Page set down his bags and shook the man’s hand, ignoring the grease on it, knowing that he gained a measure of respect by doing so.

“I called you from Santa Fe this morning about renting a car.”

“You Dan Page?”

“That’s me. I don’t know how long I’ll be staying, but I’d like to start a credit-card tab so you can charge me for the tie-down fee. Also, I need the tanks filled with 100 LL.” Most propeller-driven air- craft used that type of fuel. The LL stood for low lead, one of the few leaded fuels still sold in the United States.

“That’ll be fine-the car’s behind this building,” the mechanic said. “I’ve got the paperwork ready for you to sign.”

Carefully hiding the disarray his emotions were in, Page handed over his driver’s license and a credit card.

“We don’t have many strangers fly in here,” the mechanic added, a polite Texas way of asking why Page had come to town.

Page surprised himself with his reply.

“I’ve got marriage problems to sort out.”

11

The car was a red Toyota Celica. A wall of heat swept out when Page opened the driver’s door. He left it open while he set his bags in the trunk, but when he got behind the steering wheel, both it and the seat remained hot to the touch. He started the engine and turned on the air conditioning. As cool air streamed over him, he took a deep breath and tried to steady himself. Then he drove from the airport to where a dirt road led in only one direction, merging with the paved road into Rostov.

A water tower loomed above the low buildings ahead. To the right, cattle pens stretched along the railroad tracks. At Rostov’s outskirts, the street expanded to double the width of the road, presumably a vestige from frontier days when cattle had been herded through town.

He passed a feed-and-grain store, a saddle-and-boot shop, and a Ford dealership that seemed to specialize in pickup trucks. He reached blocks of houses that were painted earth colors ranging from sand to tan to brown. In contrast, their front doors were green or blue or red. Colorful flower gardens accentuated the single-story homes.

Where the wide street intersected with another, all of the buildings became businesses-a restaurant, a bank, a hotel, a real estate office (Page was reminded of Tori), and a clothing store. Here, too, the colors were eye-catching. One building was red while another was purple, another yellow, and another green, no hue repeating itself within any block. But despite the fresh look of the buildings, Page had the sense that most of them dated back many years and that at one time they’d been close to collapsing. He sensed something else: that he’d seen these buildings before, not in their present colorful version but the way they’d once been, just as he felt he’d seen the panorama of the cattle grazing outside town even though it was his first visit to this area.

Traffic was light. A woman pushed a baby carriage. A young man sat on a bench and played a harmonica, barely audible through the tightly closed car windows. At the end of the street to the right, Page saw an old-time railroad station. To the left, he saw a playground and a church. Across from them, a building’s domed tower made him suspect that it was a courthouse.

12

The floor was dark, worn marble. A door on the left had a frosted- glass window with black letters that told him: POLICE DEPARTMENT.

Inside, behind a counter, an elderly woman wore a leather vest. She looked up at him and smiled.

“Yes, sir?”

“My name’s Dan Page. Chief Costigan’s expecting me. I said I’d meet him at five o’clock.”

“And you’re right on time,” a raspy voice said.

Page recognized the voice he had heard that morning on the phone. He turned toward an office doorway, where a lanky man stood watching him. The man’s face was thin and creased, with the dull gray skin that smokers tend to have. He had a mustache and a small scar on his chin. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut close to his head. His uniform was tan. Although his equipment belt held a modern Glock pistol, Page wasn’t surprised to see that he wore cowboy boots.

“What you said about the airport made me curious, so I asked Harry out there to watch for you. He called to tell me when you arrived. You have your own plane?”

“A Cessna 172.”

“I get nervous in airplanes.” Costigan gestured toward his office. “Come in.”

They shook hands as Page stepped through the doorway.

“I don’t know any police officers who can afford a plane.” Costigan sat behind a vintage wooden desk. His swivel chair creaked loudly.

“I inherited it from my father. He was a mechanic in the Air Force. Listen, I hope you don’t mind if we skip the small talk. I need to know about my wife. You said one of your deputies found her car early this morning.” Page did his best to keep his emotions steady.

“Yes, sir. At the side of a road. To be precise, out at the observation platform.”

“Observation platform?”

“That’s one of the things I figured you’d understand better if I showed you rather than told you about it.”

Page waited for him to elaborate, but Costigan made no effort to do so.

“Look, I don’t understand any of this,” Page told him sharply. “Are you sure my wife isn’t hurt?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“And she isn’t with anyone?”

“She’s alone. She’s staying at a motel here-the Trail’s End. I’ll take you to her when we’re finished.” Costigan leaned forward, studying him. “How long have you been a police officer?”

“Fifteen years.”

Costigan concentrated on the right side of Page’s belt, where a chafed area indicated he often wore a holster. “I always feel off balance when I’m not wearing my weapon. Did you bring yours with you?”

“Do you know any police officer who leaves his gun at home? Do you ever go anywhere without yours, even when you’re off duty?”

Costigan kept studying him.

“It’s not my department’s gun. It’s my own,” Page said. “I have a concealed-carry permit for it. Texas and New Mexico have reciprocal arrangements.”

“I know the law, Mr. Page. But you haven’t answered my question.”

“My gun’s in my suitcase, which is safely locked in my rental car. Why do you ask?”

“Under the circumstances, I think it would be a good idea if you kept it there.”

“‘Under the circumstances’?” The words baffled Page until he realized what Costigan was getting at. “Jesus, surely you don’t think I’m a threat to my wife?”

“Domestic disputes and guns don’t go together.”

“But this isn’t a domestic dispute.” Page tried not to raise his voice.

“Really? Then why did you ask if she was with anyone? Why did she tell her mother she was going to visit her in San Antonio yet didn’t bother to tell you before she left?”

Page didn’t respond for a moment. Didn’t know what to say. Then he spread his hands helplessly, trying to keep his words steady.

“Okay, the truth is, I don’t know how to explain this. I have no idea why she left and why she didn’t tell me, and I sure as hell have no idea what she’s doing here in Rostov.”

“Why she’s here-you’ll understand tonight. As for what’s going on between the two of you…”

“You promised to take me to her.” Page stood. “We’re wasting time. Let’s go.”

“We’re not finished talking. Sit down. I’m going to tell you a story.”

“A story?” Page stared down at the man behind the desk. “What kind of crazy-”

“Yes, a story. Humor me-it’s about my father. He used to be the police chief here in Rostov.”

“What’s that got to do with-”

“You still haven’t sat back down, Mr. Page.”

The intensity in the police chief’s eyes made him hesitate.

“And then I’ll take you to your wife.”

Page sat impatiently. “Tell me your story.”

“One night my father got a phone call from a terrified boy who said his dad was beating his mom. When the boy gave his last name, my father didn’t recognize it right away. The family had moved here from Fort Worth a couple of months earlier. The husband had been out of work, and a relative of his who lived here had found him a job at the stock pens.

“When he wasn’t working, the husband liked to go to a local bar, get drunk, and pick fights. It was the hottest September anybody could remember, yet the wife always wore high, buttoned collars and long sleeves. Later it became obvious that she did that to hide bruises. The boy was quiet in school, always fidgeting as if he was afraid he’d make a mistake and get punished.

“That night, when the boy phoned, afraid that his dad was going to kill his mom, my father got in his cruiser and hurried over there. The house was near the stock pens, a run-down adobe with patches of stucco missing on the walls. The lights were on. When my father heard shouting and sobbing, he knocked on the door and identified himself as a police officer. That’s how I imagine it anyhow. I’ve gone over it in my head more times than I care to think.

“The shouting stopped. My father knocked again, and a shotgun blast from inside tore the door in half. It pretty much tore my father in half, also. I doubt he lived long enough to feel himself hit the ground.”

Page leaned forward in his chair.

“When my father didn’t report back in a half hour, a deputy drove over to the house, where he found my dad spread out on the ground. After the deputy threw up, he managed to control himself long enough to radio for an ambulance. At that time, there weren’t any other local police officers. The deputy’s only option was to contact the Highway Patrol, but they said they couldn’t get there for another half hour, so the deputy sucked up his nerve, drew his gun, and went into the house.

“The wife was on the living room floor with her head shot off. Blood was everywhere. The deputy went into the kitchen. No one was there. He went into the master bedroom. No one. He went into a smaller bedroom-the boy’s-and the window was open. The father must have heard the boy leaping out. What the searchers found the next morning made clear that the father chased his son across the road and into a field. Why did he act that way, do you suppose?”

Page inhaled slowly. “A man like that blames his family for making him unhappy. Everything’s their fault, and they need to be punished.”

“You’ve been taking psychology courses?”

“Increases my pay grade.”

Costigan looked beyond Page, as if remembering the night he’d learned that his father had been shotgunned to death. His eyes refocused.

“What you say makes sense. But here’s another explanation. Some people are wired wrong. It’s their nature to cause pain. They’re so dark inside that maybe the only word to describe them is ‘evil.’”

“Yes, I’ve met people like that,” Page said. “Too many.”

“The next morning, the searchers found the boy’s corpse in weeds a half mile from the house. The father was lying next to him. After he’d killed his son, he’d put the shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Coyotes had gotten to them by the time the bodies were found.”

Page tasted a familiar sourness in his mouth. He was reminded of the car that had been hit by the drunk driver, of the five children and the woman inside, killed instantly. He thought of the drug dealer who’d shot his friend Bobby, just two days earlier.

“I’m sorry about your father.”

“Not a day goes by that I don’t remember him. I’ll never be the man he was. But he wasn’t perfect, and what happened that night proved it. He shouldn’t have let it happen. What’s the most dangerous situation any police officer faces?”

“Family arguments.”

“Exactly. Because they’re so emotional and unpredictable. After my father knocked, he should have stepped to the side, away from the door and the windows. Or better yet, he should have stayed by his car and used his bullhorn to order the husband to step outside. If the guy had come out with a shotgun, at least my father would have had a chance to defend himself. It didn’t need to happen the way it did. But my father had a weak spot. He couldn’t stand bullies.” Costigan looked directly at Page. “Especially when they picked on women.”

“Okay,” Page said. “I get the point. But I told you, my wife and I aren’t arguing. This isn’t a domestic dispute.”

“So you say. But until I’m sure you’re not a threat to her, you won’t see her without me standing next to you.”

13

Although the sun was descending toward the horizon, its rays seemed unusually bright. In the passenger seat of the police car, Page put on his sunglasses. He pulled out his cell phone and called Margaret to let her know that Tori was okay and that he was on his way to see her. He promised to have Tori call but wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep that promise.

As they drove through Rostov, he glanced out the window at a muffler shop and a barbecue restaurant called the Rib Palace. Ahead, at the edge of town, a sign announced, TRAIL’S END MOTEL. A row of plain, single-story units formed a U, with the office in the middle.

“Your wife’s in number 11,” Costigan told him as the car crunched across the gravel parking lot, raising a cloud of dust.

But when they got to number 11, the parking space was empty.

Page felt hollow as he stepped from the cruiser. The drapes were closed, and he couldn’t see past them to tell if there was luggage inside.

They walked across the gravel, pushed open a screen door with a loud squeak, and entered the office, which had a soft-drink machine and a small television in a corner. On the screen, a reporter was announcing sports scores.

“Jake,” the police chief said to a gangly young clerk behind the counter, “the lady in unit 11. Did she check out?”

“Nope. Paid for the rest of the week. I saw her car go past twenty minutes ago.”

Costigan nodded, then gestured toward Page. “Better save a room for this gentleman.”

“No need,” Page said, annoyed. “I’ll stay with my wife.”

“As long as it’s her idea, but in case it isn’t, Jake, save him a room.”

The screen door squeaked again when Costigan opened it. Out- side, turning from the sunset, he debated for a moment. “She’s got a long night ahead of her.”

Whatever that means, Page thought. “You said your deputy found her early in the morning. What was she doing until then?”

“That’s something you need to see for yourself.”

“Chief, I’m getting tired of this.”

Costigan didn’t seem to hear him. “Maybe she went to get some- thing to eat. Let’s try the Rib Palace.”

They drove back to the restaurant, but Tori’s SUV wasn’t in the parking lot. Most of the clientele seemed to drive pickup trucks, Page noted. At the chief’s insistence, they went inside. Tori wasn’t among the early-evening crowd.

“Fred,” Costigan said to an aproned man behind a counter, “did a red-haired woman come in here about twenty minutes ago and buy some take-out food?”

“Sure did. A turkey-and-cheese sandwich, plus iced tea. Don’t get much call for turkey. She’s lucky we had some.”

“You might want to stock some more of it. I have a hunch she’ll be back. Give us a couple of burgers and fries to go.” Costigan looked at Page. “You’re not a vegetarian, I hope.”

Page just stared at him. “Burgers are fine,” he said. “I’m buying.”

The stuffed paper bag had a grease stain on one side. He carried it out to the police car. They got in and drove east. Patchy brown grass stretched in every direction. Cattle grazed in the dimming sunset.

On the right, they came to a barbed-wire fence beyond which lay the rusted ruins of collapsed metal buildings. Signs hung at regular intervals along the fence.

PROPERTY OF U.S. MILITARY

DANGER

HAZARDOUS CHEMICALS

UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE

“That used to be a military training airfield,” Costigan explained. “Back in the ’40s.”

“I saw it when I flew in. I wondered what happened to it.”

“They shut it down in 1945. Just left it. It’s been falling apart ever since.”

A short distance ahead, past what looked like a historical marker of some sort, Page saw a low wooden structure. It had a flat roof and resembled a roadside stand where vegetables might be sold. But in this case, the section that faced the road was closed, and the open side was directed toward a fence and the grassland that lay beyond. Try as he might, Page couldn’t figure out what it was for.

Tori’s blue Saturn was parked next to it.

“Yeah, she got here early,” Costigan said.

They pulled off the road and stopped behind the Saturn. The wooden structure had a sidewall that prevented Page from seeing if Tori was inside. At the same time, it prevented Tori from seeing the police car.

“I guess she figured waiting here was better than waiting in her motel room,” Costigan said.

“This is the observation platform you mentioned?”

“Yeah, where my deputy found her.”

Page reached to open the cruiser’s door.

“Wait,” Costigan said. “It won’t be long now. The sun’s almost down. As soon as it gets dark, you’ll understand.”

Page stared at him. “Why should I…”

“You’ve indulged me this far. Is ten minutes longer going to make a difference?”

“What’s so damned important about the sun going down?”

“Eat your burger before it gets cold. I promise you, this’ll be a long night.”

14

Earl Halloway sat in the air-conditioned control room, scanning the numerous monitors that showed closed-circuit images of the area around the observatory. Taggard sat next to him, chewing on a candy bar. The setting sun cast an orange tint over the array of dishes that towered aboveground. In a while, as darkness settled, the images would become green, indicating that the heat-sensing capability of the cameras had become active. Animals or people would show clearly as a glow, although at the moment not a single cow or even a rabbit was visible out there.

Halloway picked up the sports magazine that Taggard had been reading. Every minute or so, he glanced up at the monitors. Nothing was happening outside. Nothing ever happened outside, which of course was a good thing, especially compared to the ambushes and roadside bombs he’d dodged in Iraq. But God almighty, this assignment was boring.

Down the hall, Halloway heard a door close.

“I’ll be right back,” he told his partner.

Taggard nodded, taking another bite.

Halloway left the control room and walked along the hall to the door that he’d heard being closed. He knew which door it was be- cause each night it was always the same door, the one marked DATA ANALYSIS.

During the day, Gordon leaves the door open, but at night he always closes it, he thought. Why? What’s he hiding?

A renewed wave of boredom made Halloway reach for the handle, then open the door. The room was filled with the subtle hum of all the electronic devices that occupied the walls-and the even subtler vibration that he sensed everywhere in the facility and that interfered with his sleep enough to make him always feel on the verge of a headache.

Gordon wore a headset over his hairless scalp. Sitting at a desk that was turned away from the door, he studied rows of numbers accumulating on a computer screen.

When Halloway stepped closer, Gordon sensed the movement and looked in his direction. Surprised, he took off the earphones and pushed his glasses higher on his nose.

“Didn’t I lock the door? I meant to lock the door.”

“Just checking to see that everything’s okay.”

“Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?” Gordon asked defensively.

“That’s what they pay me to find out.”

Halloway heard a noise coming from the headphones that Gordon had set on the table. It was faint compared to when it had come through the speakers during the afternoon. Even so, he could tell that it sounded quite different now, no longer a persistent crackle but a series of wavering tones pitched at various levels, some rising while others descended, many of them occurring in high and low unison.

They had a subtle, sensual quiver. Their languid, arousing rhythm made him step forward.

“Sounds like music,” he said.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but you need to get out of here,” Gordon responded. “I have work to do.”

Halloway held up his hands. “Sure. Sorry to disturb you, Gordon. Like I said, I was just checking.”

As he stepped back, the noises from the earphones changed again, sounding definitely like music. But it was unlike any music he had ever heard.

As a teenager, he’d dreamed about becoming a rock star. He’d had a garage band and still played an electric guitar damned well. He knew about major and minor keys and four-four and three-four beat patterns. But this music didn’t have any key he’d ever heard, and it sure didn’t have any beat pattern that he recognized. Faint as it was, the music floated and dipped, glided and sank. The notes merged and separated in a rhythm that was almost like the way he breathed if he were on R & R, lying on a beach in Mexico, enjoying the salt smell of the air, absorbing the warmth of the sun.

“I don’t know what that is, but it’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard.”

Gordon took off his glasses, and to Halloway’s surprise, he didn’t protest again. Instead, when he spoke, it seemed as if he felt relieved to do so, to share his discovery with someone.

“It is beautiful,” he said.

“Why didn’t we hear it this afternoon?” Halloway asked.

“I have no idea. Whatever this is, it happens only after the sun goes down.”

“And you hear that every night?”

“No. Not like that. Until two nights ago, it was always faint and fuzzy, sort of hovering behind the static. I needed to do a lot of electronic filtering to get a sense of what it sounded like.”

“What happened two nights ago?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. But all of a sudden, that’s what I started hearing.”

“I can’t hear it very well,” Halloway said. “Why don’t you turn on the speakers?”

Gordon hesitated, evidently concerned that doing so would violate his orders. But then he shrugged as if to say, What the hell; I can’t keep this to myself any longer, and flicked a switch.

Instantly the floating, gliding, sailing music filled the room, making Halloway feel as if he were standing on a cushion of air. The instruments-whatever they were-had a synthesizer quality that made them impossible to identify. Perhaps it was only his imagination, but the wave-like tones seemed to drift into his ears like the arousing whisper of a woman pressed against him.

“My God, that’s beautiful,” he repeated. “What’s causing it?”

“We’ve been trying to figure that out since this place was built.” Gordon paused, then added, “And apparently a lot longer than that.”

Those last words were cryptic, but before Halloway could ask about them, Taggard appeared in the doorway.

“What kind of radio station is that? I’ve never heard anything like it. Is it on the Internet? How do I download that music?”

“If you tried to record it, somebody would have to shoot you,” Gordon said.

Taggard looked surprised.

“That’s not a joke,” Gordon told him.

Halloway barely paid attention to what they were saying. He felt the music drifting around him and then inside him, becoming part of him. The cushion of air on which he seemed to float became even softer. At the same time, the headache he’d been struggling with finally emerged from the hole where he’d managed to suppress it, like something that had festered until it couldn’t be denied.

The pain was beautiful.

15

The U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, known as

INSCOM, is one of the few branches of the U.S. military that is also a branch of a civilian organization, specifically the National Security Agency, the world’s largest electronic intelligence-gathering service. Although INSCOM maintains several bases, the one affiliated with the NSA is located at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the NSA is headquartered.

From his office window, Col. Warren Raleigh could see a mile away to the NSA’s headquarters, a tall complex of buildings topped by a vast array of antennae and microwave dishes. Two massive black structures dominated the group. During the day, their shiny dark windows reflected the five thousand cars that sat in the sprawling parking lots that surrounded them.

Raleigh thought that the reflection was appropriate. While the NSA’s occupants could see out, no one could see in. And the clandestine nature of the agency was represented in another way-although the buildings were huge, there were even more acres of space concealed underground.

His own office was located in a three-story building designed to look bland and unimposing. A metal plaque next to the entrance read, ENVIRONMENTAL WIND AND SOLAR DEVELOPMENT FACILITY, suggesting that the work inside was devoted to finding cheap, renewable sources of energy for the government and the military. In actuality, the plaque was one of Raleigh’s jokes. The idea that the government and the military would be interested in cost-cutting or ecological is- sues was laughable. To him, the E, W, and S of Environmental Wind and Solar actually stood for Experimental Weapons Strategy.

Many of the projects under development in the building were only tangentially related to the NSA’s task of gathering intelligence via electronic means, but some-such as the efforts to create lethal rays derived from the microwave beams that transmitted cell-phone messages-were logical extensions of the NSA’s tools. So were the experiments to develop communications satellites capable of firing laser beams toward enemy positions.

But when it came to hispersonal choice of weapons, as far as Raleigh was concerned, nothing equaled the feel of a firearm. The second of the building’s five underground levels featured an extensive gun range, part of which was a so-called shooting house with a maze designed to look like corridors and rooms in an ordinary apartment complex or office building. Along each corridor and within each room, potential threats lurked unseen. As life-sized targets popped up unexpectedly, the objective was to identify them correctly and eliminate armed opponents without injuring innocent bystanders. And the goal was to do so in the shortest possible time, usually no more than two minutes.

On this Thursday in early June, at 9 in the evening, Raleigh was prepared to beat his own record.

“With your permission, Colonel.”

“Do your job, Sergeant Lockhart.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lockhart, a bull of a man, shook Raleigh violently, then spun him.

“You can do better than that, Sergeant!”

“Yes, sir!”

The sergeant shook Raleigh so hard that the colonel’s teeth knocked together. Then Lockhart spun him so forcefully that the colonel had the sense of being in a centrifuge. For a moment, he wondered if the sergeant might be enjoying his work too much.

Abruptly Lockhart let go of him, thrust an M4 into his hands, and shoved him into the shooting house.

The sergeant had, indeed, done his job. Raleigh felt so disoriented that the floor seemed to ripple and the walls to tilt. His heart rushed, and his vision wavered.

Each time Raleigh tested himself in the shooting house, Lockhart reconfigured the partitions, arranging the layout in a new and unprdictable design. The one thing Raleigh could be sure of was the familiarity of the weapon in his hands. During his twenty-five-year career, he’d used its forerunner-the M16-in numerous conflicts around the world. He knew how to field-strip and reassemble an M16 in absolute darkness and with amazing speed. He’d learned to appreciate its contours and secret places as he would those of a lover. He could shoot that venerable assault rifle with remarkable accuracy, even when it was switched to full auto.

Still, the M16 had drawbacks, particularly the length of its barrel in the close environments of urban warfare, so the shorter, lighter M4 carbine had been developed. As an officer in the Army, Raleigh had his differences with the Marines, but he definitely agreed with their wisdom in requiring all officers to replace their sidearms with M4s.

At heart, we’re all riflemen, Raleigh thought.

Moving warily along a dim hallway, he checked that the M4’s selector was set for three-shot bursts. He willed his mind to stop swirling and his legs to become steady. With long-practiced biofeedback techniques, he worked to control his respiratory rate and sub- due his pulse.

A target sped out of a doorway ahead.

Raleigh aimed and held his fire. The target was an old man holding up his hands in surrender.

Raleigh peered into the room, saw that it was empty, and continued down the hallway, but at once, a noise behind him made him pivot. Another target sped from the room. Somehow it had been concealed from him. It was a man with a rifle, but before it stopped, Raleigh pulled the trigger, sending three rounds into the opponent’s head. He blew another three rounds into the old man’s head on the assumption that he was in league with the assailant and that in an actual firefight, the old bastard would probably pick up the dead man’s gun the moment Raleigh’s back was turned.

Raleigh quickly scanned the rest of the corridor. Ready to shoot, he moved forward through growing shadows. The trick was to keep his weight balanced, never placing one foot too far ahead of the other. Sliding his feet, he progressed in an efficient shuffle, always capable of adjusting to the M4’s recoil.

Another target popped from a doorway. Raleigh almost fired be- fore he saw that it was a woman holding a child. But then he realized that the child was actually a doll and that the grip of a pistol projected from behind it. He pulled the trigger and sent three bullets into the woman’s brain.

The smell of gun smoke was thick in the corridor now. Although Raleigh wore protective earplugs, his awareness was at such a level that he swore he could hear the clinking sound of his empty shells hitting the concrete floor.

How much time had gone by? How long had he been there?

Don’t think about it! Just get the job done!

The corridor went to the right. Raleigh entered an area that had a receptionist’s desk and wooden chairs in front of it. Without warning, a target surged up from behind the desk. A man with a handgun!

As Raleigh fired, a figure rushed from an office doorway-a woman in a white medical coat. She held up her hands as yet another target sped into view, this one from another doorway, a man about to throw a grenade.

Raleigh shot him, then shot a target that hurried from a farther doorway, a woman with a rifle, then shot two gunmen who rushed from the corridor on the opposite side of the reception area.

He pivoted, scanning everything that lay before him, on guard against more attacks.

His mouth was dry. His hands sweated on the M4.

The rush of his heart was so powerful that he felt pressure in the veins of his neck. Breathing deeply but not quickly, he assessed the scene before him. Were all the threats eliminated?

No.

The woman in the white medical coat continued to stand before him. Weaponless, her hands were raised.

Is the sergeant setting me up? Raleigh wondered. Is that a weapon in the pocket of her medical coat?

He twisted the M4’s selector to full auto and emptied the remainder of the magazine into her, the powerful burst blowing the ply- wood figure apart.

Through his earplugs, he heard a sharp electronic whistle, the signal that the exercise had ended. He pulled out the earplugs and turned toward Sergeant Lockhart, who approached along the corridor.

“I finished before the ninety-second time limit,” Raleigh said. “Beat my own record, didn’t I?”

“Yes, sir,” Lockhart said, but there was doubt in his voice. He glanced behind him, and Raleigh knew he was thinking of the bullet holes in the target that portrayed the old man. Then Lockhart peered ahead toward the disintegrated target of the woman in the white medical coat.

“Collaborators,” Raleigh explained. “They’d have moved against me the first chance they had.”

“Of course, sir.” Lockhart still sounded doubtful.

“Sergeant, don’t you like this assignment?”

“Sir, I’m very happy with it.”

“I could arrange to have you sent someplace that offers you more of a challenge. Perhaps a war zone.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t, sir.”

“Combat builds character, you know.”

“Sir, I’ve been in combat. With all due respect, I don’t think I need any more character.”

“Then I’ll spare you a repeat of the experience. But since you’ve been in firefights, there’s one relevant thing I’d expect you to have learned.”

“Yes, sir. And what is that?”

The colonel gestured toward the disintegrated target of the woman in the white medical coat.

“You don’t stay alive long if you take the time to worry about innocent bystanders, especially in a firefight. Sure, maybe some pussy reporter’ll accuse you of a war crime, and maybe the Army’ll cave in to the grumbling of a bunch of politicians and put you on trial. But you’ll still be alive, and ten years of hard labor is better than getting shot to death by a supposed innocent bystander who thinks you’re a fool for not killing him. Or her. There could easily have been a suicide bomb under her medical coat.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s going to be hard for anyone to outdo my new record.”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant assured him emphatically.

Raleigh’s cell phone buzzed. He pulled it from his belt and spoke into it with authority. “Raleigh here.”

What he heard made his jaw tighten.

“I’m on my way.”

16

The strange sounds seeped past the closed door of the command center one level below the underground shooting house. Raleigh heard them the moment he hurried from the elevator. He passed an armed sentry, jabbed numbers on a security pad, and pushed the door open.

The full volume of the sounds drifted over him. A dozen civilian researchers studied various electronic displays, assessing, measuring, calculating. He’d never seen his research team look so intense. Amid the multitude of glowing instruments and pulsing meters, he hurriedly closed the door and tried to identify what he was hearing. He was reminded of music, but these weren’t like any notes he’d ever heard. Granted, they were processed through a computer’s synthesizer program, which gave them an artificial tone, but he’d heard synthesizer music before, and that wasn’t what created the distinctive feeling these sounds inspired.

First, the rhythm sank into him. It drifted, so hypnotic that it seemed to counteract his quickening heartbeat. Second, the notes vibrated in a way that made the colors in the room appear to intensify. Third, the melody-which didn’t have any pattern that he could detect-made his mouth feel as if he’d just sipped…

“You’re tasting orange juice, aren’t you, Colonel?”

Startled, he looked up. A researcher had noticed him draw his tongue along his lips.

“That’s right. How did you know?”

“We all are. Do the colors seem stronger as well?” The man’s eyes flashed with curiosity.

Raleigh nodded, squinting to subdue the sudden intense glow of the monitors.

“You can almost feel the music as much as hear it,” the man continued.

“Yes. A ripple of warmth along my skin.”

“It’s called synesthesia.”

Raleigh was blessed with an encyclopedic memory. He quickly identified the word. “A process by which the stimulation of one sense somehow causes other senses to be stimulated as well.”

“Exactly,” the researcher said. “In this case, we’re not only hearing these sounds, we’re also seeing them, feeling them, and tasting them.”

Raleigh glanced from one scientist to another. He thought of the projects his team had been developing. One of his favorites was a method of transmitting ultralow sound waves that affected the physical and psychological well-being of an enemy. The enemy wouldn’t be able to hear the sound and hence wouldn’t be aware of the aural bombardment. But the effects would be profound. In the 1990s, an early version had been tested around the isolated community of Taos in northern New Mexico. For months the valley had been saturated by a low-level frequency that in theory should have been beneath the range of what human and animal ears could register but in actuality turned out to be just barely detectable. Locals who were made nervous wrecks by it took to calling it the “Taos hum.” Dogs and cats showed visible pain, scratching at their ears until they were bloody. That glitch had been corrected so that no person or animal could hear the low vibration, and Raleigh had enjoyed the power of being able to make people irritable enough to lose their tempers-even at- tack one another-simply because he had flicked a switch.

But no project had ever offered so much baffling promise as this one. It had been in development for decades, since long before Raleigh had maneuvered his career so that he’d been put in charge of it in 1995. It dated back to before INSCOM had been established in 1977, and even before the National Security Agency itself had been created in 1952. This was the culmination of something that had obsessed him since he was a boy, and it presented the chance for him to fulfill a lifelong ambition.

Finally it’s my turn.

Leaning over the console and staring at the flickering lights, he addressed his next question to the entire team.

“Usually all we get is static. Why is this happening all of a sudden?”

“It’s not just Rostov,” a woman scientist murmured as she shook her head as if to free herself from the strange music.

Raleigh turned toward a large computer screen on which a world map showed four widely separated red dots. Each of the dots was pulsing.

“Rostov started first,” a man with thick spectacles said. “But then the others began doing the same thing. The static dissolved, and…” The man gestured in mystification. “And then we heard this.”

“The others?” Continuing to taste orange juice, Raleigh moved closer to the map on the screen. One of the flashing dots was situated in west Texas. That was the one he’d automatically looked toward be- cause that was the site on which the research had always been focused. But now he peered at the other locations. Norway, Australia, and Thailand-all sites known to display phenomena similar to those in west Texas.

“What you’re hearing is the one in Australia,” the woman continued.

“But those areas are even more out of the way than Rostov,” Raleigh objected. “Hell, the one in Thailand’s on a riverbank in a jungle. The one in Australia’s hundreds of miles into the outback. And we don’t have monitoring equipment anywhere near them, let alone a radio observatory like the one in west Texas.”

“In this case, there’s no need,” the man with thick glasses explained. “The signals are so powerful they’re leaking out into the atmosphere. We’re capturing them off special frequencies on our satellites.”

“You said Rostov started to do this first?”

“Yes. Then the others became active.”

Raleigh pulled his cell phone from his belt and quickly tapped numbers.

“Sergeant, assemble a team. Civilian identities. Concealed weapons. We’re leaving for west Texas at dawn.”

17

“It’s dark enough now,” Costigan said, his figure indistinct in the police car. Neither of them had spoken in so long that his voice seemed extra loud.

“Finally,” Page told him. “It’s about time I got the answers you promised.”

“I didn’t promise answers,” the police chief replied. “What I promised was that you’d understand.”

Page shook his head in annoyance, opened the passenger door, and stepped onto the gravel parking area. He stretched to ease the tight muscles in his legs and shoulders. His companion walked to the back of the cruiser, where he opened the trunk and pulled something out.

“Here.” Costigan reached across with a windbreaker. “In a couple of hours, you’ll want this. It gets cold out here.”

“A couple of hours?” Baffled, Page took the windbreaker but didn’t put it on. Everything was shadowy in the dusk. A faint light was mounted on the sidewall of the observation platform, but its effects were minimal. The last glow of sunset disappeared below the horizon.

As he walked past Tori’s Saturn, approaching the observation plat- form, he heard a vehicle behind him and looked back toward the headlights of a Volkswagen van that steered from the road and stopped a short distance from the police car. Puzzled, he stopped to see who had arrived. The van’s headlights went off. Then interior lights came on as doors were opened. Page saw the silhouettes of a middle-aged man and woman getting out. They twisted their shoulders, stretching the kinks out after what had evidently been a long drive.

“This better be worth it,” the man said irritably. “We’re a hundred and fifty miles out of our way.”

“You said you wanted to retire early and see the country,” the woman replied.

The man surveyed the dark, barren area around him.

“And we’re sure as hell in the country. That police car’s probably here to keep people from getting robbed. Well, come on, let’s get this over with.”

The couple shut their doors, extinguishing the van’s interior lights. Their footsteps crunched on the gravel as they walked toward the observation platform.

Following their example, Page continued in that direction. Costigan veered off to throw the crumpled paper bag with the remnants of their burgers and fries into a trash can, then followed him across the lot. Before they made it another ten feet, Page heard a second vehicle approaching, then a third. Both turned into the parking area, their headlights sweeping across the structure, but he didn’t look back this time.

He came around the sidewall and found an area about thirty feet long and ten feet deep. It had a wooden floor, a roof, and a built-in bench that went all the way along the back wall. Anyone sitting there would face the grassland that stretched beyond the fence.

A solitary figure was in the middle, looking toward the dark horizon.

A woman. She wore sneakers, jeans, and a sweater. She seemed oblivious to the shadows of the middle-aged man and woman, who went over to the fence and stared past it toward the night.

Page concentrated on her, trying to understand.

“I don’t see a thing,” the man complained.

“Well, we just got here. You need to give it a chance.”

A family came around and stepped in front of the platform- parents with a young boy and girl tugging on their hands.

“By the time we get to the motel, it’ll be long past their bedtime,” the mother said.

“Hey, as long as we’re driving by, there’s no harm in stopping. It’s not as if it’s taking us out of our way,” the father replied.

“But the temperature’s going down. The kids’ll probably catch cold.”

The woman on the bench seemed oblivious to the family as well. And oblivious to Page. She just kept looking toward the night.

He smelled cigarette smoke and glanced over his shoulder toward where Costigan leaned his tall, thin body against a post that sup- ported the platform’s roof. The police chief had put on a cowboy hat and raised a glowing cigarette to his mouth. The woman didn’t pay attention to that, either.

Confused, Page looked in the direction that held her gaze. Above the horizon, he saw an amazing number of stars, with more appearing all the time as the last of the sunlight retreated. He studied the dark expanse of the grassland. Forty-five degrees to the right, he noticed the distant specks of headlights as a few vehicles approached Rostov from the Mexican border, which lay fifty miles away.

So what the hell am I supposed to understand? Page wondered. He was beginning to feel like the victim of a scam, yet he couldn’t imagine what it might be.

At the fence, the middle-aged man spoke again, echoing his thoughts. “It’s just like I told you. Nothing. Just some kind of tourist trap. I’m amazed they’re not trying to sell us something.”

“Honestly,” the woman replied, “I don’t know where you’re in such a hurry to go. Just give it a chance.”

Meanwhile, at another section of the fence, the two children tugged harder at their parents’ hands.

“Daddy, I don’t see anything,” the little girl said.

“Here, I’ll lift you up,” the father said.

“Me, too,” the little boy insisted.

“You’ll have to wait your turn. I can’t lift both of you at the same time.”

“I’ll do it.” The mother picked up the boy.

“I still don’t see anything,” the little girl said. “Daddy, the dark makes me scared.”

“Mommy, I’m hungry,” the little boy said.

“Okay,” the father told them, sounding defeated. “I guess we’d better go after all. Nothing’s out there anyhow. Tomorrow morning, maybe we can see where they made that James Deacon movie. The set’s supposed to be around here, and I hear the big old ranch house is still standing.”

As the parents carried the fidgeting children to the car, two other vehicles pulled in. One was a pickup truck, and when it stopped, three teenagers got out. The other, to Page’s annoyance, was a bus labeled TEXAS TOURS, from which about thirty people emerged. A clamor arose as they all felt the need to say whatever flitted through their minds.

Who are all these people? Page wondered. He had come here hoping to talk with his wife and to find out what had possessed her to leave. With every new arrival, a quiet reunion became more and more impossible.

To the woman on the bench, however, none of the other people seemed even to exist. She just kept staring at the horizon, never once moving her head toward the growing distractions.

Page realized that he was hesitating, that despite his effort to get here and his impatience with Costigan for making him wait, he was actually afraid of the answers he might get.

Bracing his resolve, he walked through the darkness toward his wife.

18

She had her head tilted back so that it was leaning against the shadowy wooden wall. Her gaze was straight ahead.

Page stepped up to the side and watched her.

“Tori.”

She didn’t reply.

In the background, the jabbering conversations of the people who’d gotten off the bus filled the night.

Maybe she didn’t hear me, Page thought.

“Tori?” he repeated.

She just kept staring toward the horizon.

He stepped closer. The reflected headlights from another car showed him that her eyes were wide open, and she didn’t even seem to be blinking. It was as if she were spellbound by something out there.

Again he turned in the direction she was looking, but all he saw were the dark grassland, the brilliant array of the stars, and another set of headlights off to the right on the road from Mexico.

“Tori, what are you looking at?”

No response.

Stepping closer, Page came within five feet of her and noticed in his peripheral vision that Costigan moved protectively closer, then leaned against another post. The smoke from his cigarette drifted in the air.

Suddenly Page heard her voice.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” Tori asked.

“They?” Page turned toward the dark grassland and concentrated. “What do you see?”

“You can’t see them?”

“No.”

With the noise of the annoying conversations behind him, Page almost didn’t hear what Tori said next.

“Then you shouldn’t have come.”

Baffled, he sat beside her.

Corrigan shifted again.

She still didn’t look at him.

“What did you expect me to do?” Page asked, working to keep his voice calm. “You left without telling me. You disappeared for two days. I was afraid something had happened to you. When I found out you were here, surely you didn’t expect me to stay home.”

A half-dozen people stepped onto the observation platform, their feet thunking on the wood, their voices echoing in the enclosure.

“Don’t see a thing,” one of them said. “What a crock.”

“Wait!” someone in the crowd at the fence shouted. “There!

“Where?”

“Over there! Look! Four of them!”

“Yes!” a woman exclaimed.

“I don’t see a friggin’ thing,” a teenager said.

“There!” someone said. With each exclamation, the crowd shifted and turned. The murmur died away as people focused all of their attention, then rose again when some-Page among them-saw nothing.

“You’ve gotta be shitting me. There’s nothing out there,” another teenager complained.

The crowd’s comments went back and forth. Some people were rapt, while others were frustrated. A few became angry.

Page heard Tori’s voice next to him.

“The interruptions go on for a couple of hours,” she said.

Bewildered, he studied her. They sat silently for a while, and as some of the onlookers began to leave, the headlights of their cars showed how intense her eyes were as she gazed at the darkness. Her red hair was combed back behind her ears, emphasizing the attractive lines of her face. He wanted to touch her cheek.

“Then it gets peaceful,” she said, “and you can really appreciate them.”

“Why don’t I sit here, and we’ll wait for the rest of the crowd to leave? Then you can show me.”

“Yes.”

Page felt an ache in his chest. His mind raced with questions that had nowhere to go.

Leaning against the nearby post, Costigan dropped his cigarette and crushed it with his boot, all the while continuing to watch carefully.

“When I was ten, my parents took me with them on a car trip,” Tori said, staring toward the darkness. Her voice drifted off.

Page didn’t understand why she’d told him that. Then she seemed to remember what she’d started to say.

“We lived in Austin back then, and we didn’t reach this section of west Texas until dark.” She tilted her head toward something in the distance. “My father wanted to visit a cousin of his who’d just gotten a job on a ranch out here. The cousin was only going to be in the area for a couple of months.” Again Tori paused, then seemed to remember what she’d started to say. “As you know, all my father’s relatives were wanderers.”

Including him, Page thought, but he was careful not to interrupt. Her father had deserted the family when Tori had been sixteen.

“Anyway, we drove through here,” Tori said.

The exclamations of delight in the crowd contrasted with com- plaints about the increasing chill and the impatience some felt when they didn’t see what others claimed they did. The noise made it difficult for Page to hear what Tori said, but he didn’t dare ask her to speak up for fear of having the opposite effect.

She continued, “I needed to go to the bathroom. Even back then, the county had a couple of outdoor toilets here. When I saw them in our headlights, I yelled for him to stop, but my father was in a hurry to see his cousin. He wouldn’t have stopped if my mother hadn’t insisted. I rushed into one of the toilets, and after I came out, my father was waiting impatiently by the car. Something made me look toward the grassland, and I saw them.”

“Saw what?”

Tori seemed not to have heard the question.

“I couldn’t help walking toward the fence and staring at them. My mother always took me to church on Sunday, and I thought that when the preacher told us about heaven, this is what he must have been talking about.

“My father ordered me to get in the car, but I couldn’t make myself do it. I couldn’t bear to stop looking at what was out there. He wanted to know what the hell I thought I was seeing. I tried to explain, but all he said was something about a damned fool kid’s imagination. I remember trying to push him away when he picked me up and carried me to the car. I shouted and pounded him. He literally threw me into the back seat.”

“I’m sorry,” Page said. “Maybe it was a good thing that he eventually left.”

When Tori didn’t continue, Page regretted his interruption, but then he realized that she’d stopped only because she’d renewed her attention on the darkness.

“There!” a woman at the fence shouted.

“Yes!” a man joined in.

Another woman pointed. “Five of them!”

“I don’t see anything!”

Disgusted, the teenagers got into the pickup truck and drove away. A half-dozen people wandered toward the bus, but a surprising number remained, staring toward the darkness.

“There’s one on the left!” someone exclaimed.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?” someone else asked.

Page wondered the same thing.

Again Tori spoke, still not looking at him. “I’d forgotten about this place until two days ago.”

“The day you started to drive to your mother’s house,” Page said. The words he almost used were, The day you left me.

“I’d gone a little beyond El Paso. It was six in the evening. I was at a truck stop, studying a road map while I drank a cup of coffee. I still had a long way to drive to get to San Antonio, and I wondered if I might need to stop somewhere for the night. Interstate 10 goes south east along the Mexican border until it gets to a town called

Esperanza, where the highway cuts directly east to San Antonio. I figured Esperanza might be a good place to stop.” She paused. “Interesting name for a town.”

“‘Esperanza’?” Page had lived in the Southwest long enough to know that the word was Spanish for “hope.”

Tori smiled at something in the darkness. Page waited, beginning to feel afraid. A minute later, she continued. Her voice was so calm that it was as if she were reading a bedtime story to a child.

“I looked toward the bottom of the map to find the inches-to- miles scale and figure out how much farther I needed to go. But as my eyes drifted past the names of towns, one of them caught my attention: Rostov. It must have been tucked away in my memory all these years. Amazing.

“Suddenly that night came back to me as vividly as if it had happened yesterday. I remembered that the roadside toilet had a sign on the door: ‘Property of Rostov County.’ I remembered coming out of the toilet and seeing what was in the darkness past the fence. I remembered how angry my father got when he didn’t understand what I was talking about and threw me into the car. I could feel the tears in my eyes and how I wiped them and stared through the back window to- ward the darkness until I couldn’t see anything out there anymore as we drove away.

“We drove so long that eventually I fell asleep in the back seat. Even then, I dreamed about them.”

“There!” someone at the fence exclaimed, pointing.

“So I finished my coffee and folded the map and got in the car,” Tori said. “When I reached Esperanza, instead of stopping for the night, I kept driving, but I didn’t turn east on Interstate 10 to go to San Antonio. Instead I took a county road and kept following it southeast along the border. The sun went down, but I kept driving until I got here. This observation platform didn’t exist back then-there were just the toilets. I was afraid I’d discover that my memory had tricked me, that what I’d seen that night had been only a damned fool kid’s imagination, exactly as my father had insisted.”

“There’s another one!” someone exclaimed.

Tori smiled toward where a man pointed, and she fell silent again. In a while, she continued, “It was late. Hardly anybody was around. I can’t describe the relief I felt when I stepped out of the car and looked past that fence and saw that what I’d remembered-and what I realize now I’ve been dreaming about all these years-was real. I came over and sat on this bench, in the same spot where I’m sitting now and the same spot where I sat last night, and I didn’t want to do anything but stay here the rest of the night and look at what I’d seen when I was ten.

“My life might have been so much different if my father had just allowed me to watch a little longer.”

“Different?” Page asked. “How?”

Tori didn’t answer. That sent a chill through him that had nothing to do with the night air.

“Watch as long as you want,” Page said.

“I will.”

“I didn’t come here to stop you,” he tried to assure her.

“I know. Besides, you can’t.”

Page looked over at Costigan, who continued to lean protectively against the nearby post. He spread his hands as if to say, Are you starting to get the idea?

But Page didn’t get anything, not anything at all. He was mystified.

And afraid. He worried that Tori was having some kind of breakdown.

If so, he realized, looking around silently, apparently a lot of other people were having the same breakdown.

“Tori…”

She continued smiling wistfully toward the darkness.

“I love you,” he said. The words came out before he realized. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d said them. He didn’t get a reaction.

“Tori, tell me what you’re seeing. Help me see it, too.”

“I don’t think you can,” she said.

“But how do you know?”

“For the same reason I left.”

The stark acknowledgment of what Page had been dreading made him feel as if a fist had struck his stomach. He remained silent for several long minutes, trying to recover his equilibrium. Trying to think of something he could say that would make things better.

“If you teach me, I can learn,” he said. “Whatever it is I’ve done wrong, I can correct it.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. There’s no blame in being what you are. Or in my being who I am.”

Page turned toward the darkness, desperate to understand what Tori was talking about. Even though many of the people in the crowd pointed, all he saw were the night-shrouded grassland, the brilliant stars in the sky, and the isolated headlights on the road to the right.

Which of us is crazy? he wondered.

He strained his eyes, trying to adjust to the night and decipher the darkness. He was reminded of something his father had shown him when he was fifteen. Because of his father’s skills as a master mechanic in the Air Force, the family had been relocated to numerous bases over the years, including some in Germany, South Korea, and the Philip- pines. One of those had been MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

On an August Sunday, Page’s father had made a rare effort to spend time with his family by taking Page and his mother to the famed Tampa aquarium. They wandered from tank to tank, peering through thick glass walls at various exhibits: sharks, manta rays, moray eels- his father enjoyed looking at anything dangerous-and various schools of brilliantly colored exotic species. But the space behind one glass wall appeared empty except for water, sand, rocks, aquatic plants, and part of a replica of a sunken ship.

“I guess the aquarium’s getting ready to stock it with something,” Page said, quickly bored, turning away.

“No, it’s already stocked,” his father replied.

“With what? Nothing’s moving in there. It’s empty.”

“Oh, there’s plenty of life in there.”

“You mean the plants.”

“No. I mean cuttlefish.”

“Cuttlefish?”

“They’re not really fish. They’re in the squid family.”

“Cuttlefish?” Page repeated.

“With tentacles that project forward. They can be as little as one of your fingers or as long as your arm, sometimes bigger.”

“There’s no fish in there as long as my arm,” he scoffed.

“Squid,” his father corrected him.

“Okay, there’s no squid in there as long as my arm.”

“Actually, there are probably a dozen of them.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

His father gestured toward the glass. “Take a look. A real close look.”

Page had long before learned that his father prided himself on an amazing assortment of knowledge about all kinds of unusual subjects. When his father spoke that authoritatively, there was only one way the conversation could end. So Page concentrated on the water in the huge tank.

“Sometimes we see only what we expect to see,” his father explained. “Sometimes we need to learn to see in a new way.”

That made even less sense than the imaginary fish. “I don’t know what you…”

At once one of the rocks seemed to move a little. Hardly enough to be noticed. Barely a fraction of an inch. But he was certain he’d seen it move. He stepped closer to the glass.

“Ah,” Page’s father said, apparently detecting his sudden attention. “I think you’re starting to catch on.”

“That rock. It…”

“But it’s not a rock,” Page’s father emphasized.

The object moved another fraction of an inch, and Page realized that his father was right-it wasn’t a rock.

Page saw a head then, and a tentacle, and another. Not that the object moved any more noticeably than before. But Page’s vision had changed-or else it was his mind that had shifted focus.

His father said, “Sometimes we see only what we expect to see.”

He was beginning to understand. If the only things that were apparent were sand, rocks, underwater plants, and part of a replica of a sunken ship, then the mind took those shapes for granted and didn’t bother to recognize what the eyes were seeing.

Amazingly, another rock moved. A patch of sand shifted slightly as well. A section of the sunken ship turned to the side, and one of the plants started walking across the bottom of the tank. The green spikes on it were actually tentacles. Years later, when Page was being trained at the New Mexico police academy, he thought back to that afternoon when he’d realized that there could be a huge difference between what the eyes saw and what was truly before them, that the world was not always what it seemed. Unfortunately, he later discovered, ugliness too often was the truth of what was before him.

But not that afternoon. Excitedly, he began counting the creatures he suddenly noticed. They were everywhere, it seemed.

“One, two, three.”

“Four, five, six,” his father said.

“Seven, eight, nine,” his mother joined in, laughing. That was the summer before she was diagnosed with the breast cancer that would kill her.

His father predicted that there were a dozen cuttlefish in the tank, but in the end Page counted eighteen, weird, ugly-looking creatures with a strange name for a squid, who’d learned to conceal their ugliness and after a while began to seem beautiful. Within minutes he wasn’t able to see the sand, rocks, underwater plants, or replica of the sunken ship because so many cuttlefish were in the way.

“How do they hide like that?” he asked his father, grinning in astonishment.

“Nobody knows. Chameleon lizards are famous for being able to assume the colors of objects around them. Spiders can do it, too. But nothing’s as good at it-and as quick at it-as cuttlefish.”

“Magic,” Page said.

“Nature,” Page’s father corrected him.

19

Page remembered that long-ago afternoon as he strained to look at the darkness beyond the fence while the crowd of strangers before him marveled at things he didn’t see. Some complained that they didn’t know what the others were getting so excited about, and Page understood their frustration. Was he witnessing a mass hallucination, some kind of group delusion in which people convinced one another that they were seeing something that wasn’t there?

But Tori hadn’t been with a group when she’d first seen it, and she hadn’t been with a group when she’d come here alone after so many years of remembering and dreaming. If there was a delusion, she’d brought it on herself.

Or maybe I’m the one who’s deluded, Page thought. Hell, all those years and I couldn’t even get my wife to share something so important that it brought her back to the middle of nowhere.

But he had to stay calm.

Remember the cuttlefish, he told himself. Remember what your father told you. “Sometimes we see only what we expect to see. Sometimes we need to learn to see in a new way.”

Lord knows, I need to learn to see in a new way.

The reality Page thought he knew had been turned inside out. The marriage he’d thought he had, the life he’d prized-nothing was what it had seemed to be.

Why? Page shouted inwardly. How could I not have seen this coming?

He rose from the bench and stepped to the edge of the observation platform. Vaguely aware of Costigan leaning against the post near him, he stared over the heads of the people in the excited crowd and concentrated on the darkness.

Again he noticed the specks of distant headlights approaching along the road from Mexico. But that couldn’t be what the people in the crowd were thrilled about. They were pointing in a different direction altogether.

He studied the brilliant array of stars, surprisingly much brighter and more varied than he was accustomed to in Santa Fe, which was renowned for the clearness of its night sky. Maybe they were why the government had built the radio telescopes nearby. But the people in the crowd weren’t pointing toward the stars-their rapt attention was focused entirely on the horizon.

What do they think they’re seeing? Page wanted to know.

Remember the cuttlefish, he urged himself.

He focused on the darkness across the grassland.

And saw an almost imperceptible movement, hardly enough to be noticed…

Except that he was sure he had noticed it. Either his eyes had shifted focus or his mind had. It wasn’t only movement-it was a change in the darkness.

Without warning, there were tiny lights. Some of what he’d thought were stars weren’t in the sky-they were hovering over the grassland. At first he suspected they might be distant fireflies, about a dozen of them, but they were brighter than fireflies, and as he began to notice them, they increased in size.

They could have been miles away, yet they seemed close, as if he could reach out and touch them, which he tried to do. That was when he realized the people in the crowd weren’t just pointing-they, too, were reaching out.

As he gazed, the distant lights acquired colors-red, green, blue, yellow, and more-all the tints he’d seen on houses and stores in town. Pairs of them merged, becoming larger and brighter. They rose and fell. At the same time, they drifted back and forth across the horizon, as if they floated in a gentle current. They bobbed and pivoted hypnotically.

What am I seeing?

Confused, Page turned toward Costigan, looking for confirmation that his eyes weren’t tricking him, but all the police chief did was spread his hands again.

Page turned back, redirecting his attention to what he saw-or thought he saw-on the horizon. Some of the lights drifted apart, while others continued to merge. They shimmered, gentle and soothing, almost seeming to beckon.

I’ve never seen anything like them, he thought. What are they? Without warning, doubt surged through him. Why didn’t I see them a minute ago? They’ve got to be an optical illusion.

Or maybe I’m so eager to see something out there that I strained my eyes until I saw spots before them. Or else I concentrated until I imagined them. How do I know they’re what Tori sees-or thinks she does?

What do the others think they’re seeing?

Not only seeing, he realized. There was something else associated with the lights, something he couldn’t quite identify. It was just on the edge of his perceptions, a sound that hovered at the limit of his ability to hear it.

As Page stepped off the platform, intending to approach and question a teenaged girl who pointed in delight at the grassland beyond the fence, he became aware of a commotion somewhere in the crowd. A single voice rose above the others.

“Don’t you see how evil they are?” someone demanded.

Page stopped and tried to determine the direction of the voice. It was deep, strong, and angry. It belonged to a man.

“Don’t you realize what they’re doing to you?”

To his right, Page saw sudden movement, people being jostled aside, a tall, heavy man sweeping through them.

“Stop pushing!” someone complained.

“Get your hand off me!” someone else objected.

The voice just sounded angrier. “Don’t you understand that you’re all going to hell?”

“A gun!” a woman wailed. “My God, he has a gun!”

As the word sent a wave of alarm through the crowd, Page responded instantly and crouched. Reaching for the pistol that he almost always carried, he realized with dismay that he’d let Costigan talk him into leaving it in his suitcase back in the rental car, which was parked outside the courthouse.

His palms became sweaty.

Crouching lower, feeling his pulse race, he scanned the panicking crowd and flinched at the loud, ear-torturing crack of a rifle. He saw the muzzle flash among fleeing men and women, revealing what looked like the barrel of an assault weapon.

Crack. The man fired again, aiming beyond the fence. The muzzle flash projected toward the horizon, toward whatever was out there, toward whatever Page had thought he’d seen.

“Go back to hell where you came from!” the man shouted into the distance, and he kept firing.

Page saw enough of the rifle’s silhouette to identify a curved ammunition magazine projecting from the bottom. The profile was that of an AK-47.

Urgently he glanced behind him, toward Costigan, seeing that the police chief had drawn his pistol and was crouching tensely, just as Page was.

The chaos of the crowd now shielded the man with the rifle, and for a moment, he was lost from sight.

Crack. Another muzzle flash projected toward the darkness.

“You’re all damned!” But the gunman was no longer yelling toward whatever had entranced them. Instead he turned and began yelling at the crowd. Page had the sickening realization of what was about to happen.

No!

The man fired directly into the crowd. People screamed and smashed against one another, desperate to escape.

A man tripped.

A woman wailed.

Then Page realized that the man hadn’t tripped. A bullet had dropped him.

The gunman fired yet again.

Page had seldom felt so helpless. Even if he’d had his pistol, the darkness and the commotion would have prevented him from get- ting a shot at the man with the rifle.

Crack. A woman fell.

Crack. A teenaged boy toppled. The crowd’s frightened shouts became so loud that Page almost couldn’t hear the rifle. He saw the barrel swing in his direction.

Tori! he thought desperately. Pivoting, he ran toward the observation platform. Costigan was no longer in sight, but Page didn’t have time to figure out what the police chief was doing.

Tori!

She was on her feet, so overwhelmed that she didn’t have the presence of mind to react. Page had taught her about firearms and had asked her to keep a handgun in her purse. He’d worried about her taking clients out to remote locations where she’d be alone with them, but Tori never carried the gun he’d given her. The truth was, although she was a police officer’s wife, her attitudes were those of a civilian.

He put an arm around her and gripped her tightly, rushing her off the platform. Behind him, a bullet hit a board in the back wall. When she cried out in alarm, he pushed her head down, making her stoop as he rushed her around the corner. This was the side opposite from where Costigan had parked the police car, but Page was relieved to see that vehicles were parked here as well, and he tugged her behind a murky pickup truck.

“Are you okay?” he asked, examining her as best he could in the starlight.

She was too disoriented to answer.

A shot echoed from beyond the observation platform.

“Tori, answer me. Are you hurt?”

His abrupt tone made her flinch, bringing her to awareness.

“I… No. I’m okay. I’m not hit.”

“Thank God. Stay here. Keep behind the engine. Bullets can go through the truck’s doors, but not through the engine. If you think the shooter’s coming in this direction, fall down and pretend you’re dead.”

In the shadows, she stared at him.

“Tori, tell me you understand.”

Beyond the observation deck, two shots were followed by a scream.

She blinked repeatedly. “Keep behind the engine,” she said, swallowing. “If he comes this way, I’m supposed to fall down and pretend I’m dead.”

Crack. The gunman fired again.

“I can’t stay with you,” Page said. “I need to help stop him.”

“Why is he doing this?”

“I don’t know why people do anything.”

The next shot Page heard was a loud pop rather than a crack. A pistol. Costigan must be returning fire, he decided.

He squeezed Tori’s shoulder and ran from the cover of the pickup truck. At once he heard another pistol shot, then a rifle shot.

And a groan. Its raspy edge left no doubt that it came from

Costigan.

20

The turmoil of his heartbeat contrasted with the slowness he forced upon himself when he reached the corner of the wall. His hands trembled. He fought to control them.

The wooden planks of the wall couldn’t protect him from an AK-47’s high-powered bullet, but at least they concealed him as he crouched beneath the shooter’s eye level and peered around the corner.

The faint light from the opposite side of the observation platform showed him a nightmare. Bodies lay all around. Some twitched, but most remained still.

The shooter stalked among them.

“Came from hell!” He fired down at a head, his rifle’s muzzle flash casting him in a grotesque silhouette. “Going back to hell!”

Where’s Costigan? Page wondered frantically.

He inhaled sharply when he saw the police chief’s body sprawled on the ground halfway between the observation platform and the crowd. Costigan’s pistol lay near his outstretched right hand.

The gunman fired at a twitching body, the muzzle flash revealing a spray of blood. He dropped an empty magazine and inserted a fresh one so quickly that Page didn’t have the chance even to think about charging across the parking lot and tackling him.

The man aimed down, about to shoot at another squirming body, but suddenly stopped and lowered the rifle. He turned as if something had caught his attention. Page followed the direction of his gaze.

What the shooter looked at was conspicuous, even in the dark. It was white, so big that it couldn’t be ignored. Inside it, people whimpered and wailed.

The tour bus.

My God, Page realized, before he started shooting, some of the passengers went back to their seats.

The gunman walked toward it. With his back to Page, he faced the dark windows of the bus. He stood straighter, as if energized, and took long steps over bodies, approaching his new target. As he rounded the front, disappearing toward the door, Page was tempted to hurry from the side of the observation platform, wanting desperately to reach Costigan’s pistol. But the sound of his footsteps on the gravel would almost certainly attract attention. There was little chance that he could reach the pistol before the gunman heard him coming and reappeared, shooting.

A fist banged against the opposite side of the bus.

“Open the door!” the gunman demanded.

Page backed along the sidewall of the observation platform and headed toward the dark road.

“Open the damned door!”

Page got to the road and hurried along it, his sneakers hushed on the pavement.

Shots clanged through metal. The gunman was firing into the side of the bus. The AK-47’s bullets were capable of penetrating the metal, passing straight through, and going out the other side. A human body would barely slow them.

After the next shot into the side of the bus, someone screamed.

Page reduced speed as he came along the road and neared the back of the bus.

The next shot was followed by a cry of pain. Bullets shattered windows. The sound of terrified wailing intensified.

Page was troubled by another sound he began to hear: that of liquid spilling onto the gravel.

“Came from hell!” the man screamed.

The smell of gasoline drifted into Page’s nostrils.

“Going back there!”

Page’s training had taught him that only in the movies did a shot to a vehicle’s fuel tank cause a fire, let alone an explosion. This guy could shoot at the bus’s fuel tank all night, but unless he had incendiary ammunition, the only effect would be a lot of holes.

And more leaking fuel. The gasoline fumes smelled stronger.

He moved warily, hoping the darkness behind him would conceal his outline. Peering around the back of the bus, he saw the gunman, who was so intent on shooting at the gas tank that he didn’t notice anything else. He stepped back from a pool of gasoline that was spreading on the gravel.

Oh, God-surely he isn’t…

The man set down his rifle and pulled a book of matches from a shirt pocket.

Page charged.

The man tore a match from the book and struck it along the abrasive strip. The match flared.

Then he heard Page coming and turned. The light from the match cast shadows up his face, exaggerating its harsh angles. His eyes reflected the flame, emphasizing their intensity.

He lit the entire book.

Page ran faster, yelling obscenities as fiercely as he could, trying to startle the man, to distract him from what he intended to do.

The shooter dropped the burning matches an instant before Page crashed into him. As they hit the gravel, Page could only pray that they would go out, but instantly he heard a whoosh behind him. Flames dispelled the darkness. Heat rushed over his back.

Outraged, he slammed the man’s head against the gravel. Hair and bone crunched against the stones. But the man simply roared and swung his arm with such force that he cast Page aside. Even given the man’s height and muscular build, his strength was amazing. He had to be on some kind of psychosis-inducing drug.

The flames roared upward, enveloping the rear of the bus. Page squirmed backward to escape them.

Snap, snap, snap.

The heat broke windows. The wails of the people trapped inside became hysterical. Seeing the gunman reach for his rifle, Page came to his feet and charged again. The impact of striking him was so great that it sent both of them farther from the bus.

They hit the gravel and skidded. Landing on top, Page tried to drive a fist into his opponent’s larynx, but the man abruptly twisted, and Page connected only with the side of his neck. The man swung his arm again and struck Page’s shoulder so hard that he knocked Page off him. The blow jolted Page almost to the point of paralyzing him. Groaning, he stuck out a foot and tripped the man as he ran to- ward his rifle. The man landed heavily, grunting loudly.

The flames spread along the bus, their heat radiating toward Page’s face.

“Open the door! Get off the bus!” he yelled to the people inside.

He grabbed the gunman from behind and clamped his left arm around the man’s neck, straining to choke him. Simultaneously he drove his right fist into the man’s right kidney, punching him again and again.

The man lurched backward, ramming Page against a car behind him. As he groaned from the impact, the man twisted away from the car and deliberately fell back. Page groaned again when he struck the gravel. He felt crushed by the man’s considerable weight landing on him.

He couldn’t breathe.

His arm loosened around the man’s neck.

In a rush, the man came to his feet, kicked Page in the right side, and lunged again for his rifle. All the while, the flames roared upward from the rear of the bus and spread toward the front. Page felt the heat through his shirt.

Pumped by adrenaline, he forced himself to his feet.

The man picked up the rifle.

Page charged, struck the man from behind, and propelled him into the flames. The fire was so thick that Page couldn’t see the rear of the bus, but he heard a thump when the man struck it.

The man’s clothes caught fire. His hair blazed.

Turning, he seemed to smile-or maybe it was the effect the flames had on his facial muscles. The rifle fell from his burning hands.

He held out his arms and stepped forward.

Page stumbled away from him.

Ablaze, the man kept lurching toward him, his flaming arms out- stretched, his mouth spread in a grotesque smile.

Page jolted back against a car. He squirmed along it, trying to get away from the fiery nightmare that kept stalking toward him. The man’s smile wasn’t defined any longer as flesh shrank away from his teeth. He was terribly close, and the smell of his burning flesh was sickening.

About to give Page a fiery embrace, he abruptly twisted to the side. The sound of a shot was almost absorbed by the roar of the flames. A second shot made him stagger. His face tilted skyward, for the first time showing anguish.

A third and fourth shot dropped him to his knees.

A fifth shot blew a hole through his head.

The man dropped face down, embracing the gravel, his broiling flesh spreading across it.

Page staggered away from him, staring toward his left. The shooter was Tori. She held Costigan’s pistol with two hands, her arms ex- tended, her wrists and elbows locked the way Page had taught her. Her face was twisted with fury. She squeezed the trigger again, shooting into the flames that covered the man.

“Bastard!” she screamed. “Bastard!”

The door to the bus banged open. A half-dozen people surged out from the smoke. They sobbed and coughed, running toward the cold darkness and away from the bus, which was little more than a flaming coffin now.

Page hurried around the car and approached Tori from the back. As heat swept over them, she shot again toward the flames that consumed the man.

“Now you’re the one who’s going to hell!” she screamed.

“Tori,” Page said. He came up next to her, reaching for the gun. “It’s okay now. He can’t hurt anybody anymore. Give me the pistol.”

She fired again at the burning corpse’s back.

“You son of a bitch!”

“He’s dead,” Page told her. “You don’t need the gun anymore.”

He put his right hand on the pistol and pressed it down, encouraging her to lower her arms.

“Give it to me.”

Gradually the tension in her hands relaxed. Slowly she released the weapon.

Page’s cheeks felt raw from the heat. He guided her in a wide arc around the front of the bus, away from the fire. As the air became darker, it cooled his skin.

The people who’d escaped from the bus slumped near the fence, sobbing. Bodies lay everywhere. He counted twenty but knew there were more. A few squirmed in pain. Most had the stillness of death.

“Tori, don’t look.” He guided her to the Saturn, where he hoped she’d feel sheltered, but the car was locked, and when he felt the front pockets of Tori’s jeans, he didn’t find the keys. They must be in her purse, he thought.

He led her to the bench on the observation platform. He looked around but couldn’t find the purse in the darkness. After sitting her down, he promised, “I’ll be right back.”

He ran to Costigan. The chief’s cowboy hat lay beside him. The left side of his head was covered with blood. Page touched his wrist and felt a pulse.

“Hang on,” he told him.

He found the car keys in Costigan’s pants and ran to the cruiser, pressing the unlock button on the key fob. Inside, he grabbed the radio’s microphone.

“Officer down! Officer down!”

“Who’s this?” a man’s angry voice demanded. “How’d you get on this radio?”

“Officer down!” Page had trouble keeping his voice steady enough to identify himself and describe what had happened. “I was with the chief! He’s been shot!”

“What?”

“At least twenty other people were hit. At the observation platform outside town. A bus is on fire, and…” As he supplied more details, the enormity of what had happened struck him. “The assailant’s dead, but we need all the help you can bring.”

“If this is a joke-”

“Look at the horizon east of town. You ought to be able to see the glow of the fire.”

“Just a…” The pause was suddenly broken. “Holy… I’ll get help as quick as I can.”

Page sat numbly in the cruiser and stared toward the devastation that lay beyond the windshield. The light from the flames rippled over the bodies. His side aching, he got out of the car and stepped around pools of blood, approaching the people who’d escaped the burning bus.

“Help’s on the way,” he promised them.

“Thank you,” a woman told him through her tears. “Thank you for saving us.”

“I was sure I was going to die,” a man said, trembling. “… Never been so scared.”

“Why did he do it?” someone demanded. “Why?”

Amid the roar of the flames, Page noticed that more survivors were warily emerging from their hiding places. Some had crawled under vehicles. Others had run across the road and concealed them- selves in the darkness of a neighboring field.

An elderly man wavered among the corpses. Smoke drifted over him.

“Where’s Beth? Where’s…?” The old man stopped and groaned. Grief made him sink to his knees. He cradled the head of one of the bodies.

Heartsick, Page went back to the observation platform.

Tori no longer stared toward the grassland. Instead she bent despairingly forward, her face in her hands.

She shivered.

Page noticed the windbreaker on the bench. He got it and draped it over her shoulders. He finally saw her purse on the floor, where she must have dropped it when the shooting had started. He placed it next to her. Numb, he sat beside her, put an arm around her, and listened to the blare of the approaching sirens.