The Rift

CHAPTER 7

Iris Watkins was five feet tall if she really stretched and dripping wet didn’t break three figures on the scale. And she had twenty pounds of baby in a halter on her chest and two kids under five fighting her for control of the grocery cart. She tried to grab some 2 percent milk without banging the baby’s head into the cooler door when one of those grandmother types stopped her and started going on about how cute the kids were. And then, of course: “My! What a big baby for such a teeny little thing like you.”

Why don’t you hand me some milk or hold the door for me? Iris thought. As if she didn’t hear that all the time. Of course, they’d never seen the father, and he hadn’t been a tiny little thing. He hadn’t even been a normal thing. He’d been huge, thus the large baby, but that also probably contributed to him being such a large target and getting hit fourteen times covering his team’s withdrawal in Afghanistan last year.

But he’d kept firing, up until the last bullet hit him just under the left eye.

Watkins had asked for every single detail from the SEAL teammates who’d accompanied the body back to the States. She had to know and it gave her comfort to understand he’d died fighting, doing what he was trained to, and he died on the battlefield, not in a medevac or in surgery.

It was the way a warrior should die and her husband had been a warrior. He’d died like the Viking he was, weapon in hand, fighting until he gave his last breath.

One of the girls had wandered off and grabbed a box of no-you-can’t-have-that cereal loaded with sugar, as if she wasn’t hyper enough, and the other was now clinging to Watkins’s leg complaining about something, voice working its way up to a squall.

Iris forced a smile to her lips for the old woman, who was doing nothing but getting in the way. She thought how pleasant menopause must be and imagined herself one day shopping all alone without the usual quiz questions: How old, how much does he weigh, he doesn’t have your eyes so it must be the father, what does his dad do? The innocent questions, some of which could cause a stab of pain so hard in her chest she thought she’d just collapse into the empty void that was there.

What she held on to was mirroring his courage, in the more subtle, but sometimes even more challenging field of negotiating everyday life, being a war widow in a country that barely remembered it was at war and taking care of their three children.

Then she heard, buried deep in her purse, the ringtone that she could never ignore. She grabbed for the phone, swinging the baby accidently into the cart handle, which brought a shriek. Watkins ignored even that in the call of duty and pulled the phone out as the old woman huffed and puffed away, talking about these young mothers these days.

Watkins typed in the new destination for the encrypted message and sent it.

Then she dumped the phone back into the bag and held her baby tight, murmuring an apology. She was grateful for the check the Loop sent every month, because the death benefits just weren’t enough to cover three kids.

And it made her feel a part of…

What exactly, she wasn’t sure.

She looked in her baby’s eyes and she saw his eyes and she felt that searing clash of joy over the life she held and agony over the life she’d lost.

Then she couraged up and got the milk.

The Archives elicited more excitement from Ivar than the Can had, perhaps because the Can reminded him of “bench time,” which some physicists loved but others avoided.

“Somebody saw this and thought of the ending for Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Ivar said as they walked in the yawning steel doors in the front of the Area 51 Archive. As far as one could see were rows and rows of crates, vehicles, planes, boats, and weird-shaped objects covered in tarps, until it all faded into a haze. There was a far end; one could barely make it out in the distance. Ivar estimated it was over a half mile away.

“It’s bigger than the Boeing Everett Factory,” Doc said proudly, as if he’d put in most of the rivets himself. He was beginning to really get on Ivar’s nerves, with his “I’ve been here longer than you and know more than you and am smarter than you and have more PhDs than you” attitude.

Doc blithely continued. “People think the Boeing factory is the biggest building in the world. And,” he added, quite unnecessarily — Doc was well known among the Nightstalkers for adding the unnecessary, which on occasion had turned out to be necessary—“the Archives are underground, enclosed in this cavern inside Groom Mountain.”

Ivar bit back his sarcastic reply that he hadn’t known they’d been inside the mountain for over an hour now. He’d worked under a lot of professors like Doc and sarcasm rarely worked. Most scientists took things quite literally. The Big Bang Theory was funny; Doc wasn’t.

They stepped across the metal rail on which the huge doors rolled shut and entered the Archives, only after having their retinas scanned for the umpteenth time by a pair of guards who looked so bored, they might shoot someone just to watch them die, aka Johnny Cash style.

“Warehouse 13,” Ivar said, choosing another approach. “Someone definitely took the last scene of Raiders as the idea for that.”

“This is real,” Doc said, obviously not a TV or movie person. He pointed down. “The entire Archives is on large springs to absorb the impact if a nuke hit the mountain above us. They built this long before they built NORAD. The first building was just a World War Two prefab hut, but as you can see, it’s expanded considerably since then.”

“Why?” Ivar asked.

“During the Cold War—” Doc began, but Ivar cut him off when he was heading for the wrong pass.

“I mean, why did Area 51 need an archive?”

Doc sighed as they strolled down the main aisle. A golf cart came whizzing by, two men in white coats on it, one of them staring at a map, giving directions. It sped around a corner and was gone. Somewhere in the distance it sounded like someone was pounding a sledgehammer on a pipe, a distinct sound, occurring every twenty seconds or so.

“World War Two,” Doc said. He, too, had a map, an actual paper map, in his hand and he consulted it. He pointed left. “The earliest stuff gathered is in that corner. From Operation Paperclip.”

“Sounds innocent enough,” Ivar said, more interested to learn whether they had the Ark of the Covenant in here or at least some crystal skulls.

“You have no idea what Operation Paperclip was.” Doc stopped, carefully folded the map, and placed it in his breast pocket. He adjusted his spectacles and looked Ivar up and down, as if he were a specimen that had crawled out from under some rock. “Very few things we deal with here are innocent. Innocence is something one leaves behind when coming to Area 51. Let me tell you about innocence and this great country we call our own. Do you know what the OSS was?”

Ivar shook his head, surprised at Doc’s intensity. It wasn’t like they were talking about particle physics or quantum mechanics.

“As the Second World War was coming to a close,” Doc said, “there were those in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA and Special Forces, who were looking ahead. In a way, they were also our predecessors here in the Nightstalkers. They were already looking past the war to the next war. There’s always a next war,” Doc added.

That struck a chord with Ivar because war had struck close to him just four years ago. “As Plato said a long, long time ago, ‘only the dead have seen the end of war.’”

“You didn’t get the full in-brief from Moms and Nada,” Doc said. “But you get Moms talking, she’ll tell you the Nightstalkers were founded the day guys like you and me, scientists, split the atom and then learned how to turn that into a weapon.”

“‘I am become—’”

Doc’s tolerance for Ivar’s deep well of quotes was on a tight leash. “Yes, yes. I know what Oppenheimer said. Moms quotes it all the time. But World War Two changed warfare. We not only saw our own country invent, and use, the atomic bomb, but we also saw other weapons of mass destruction developed to even more lethal levels by scientists. All these weapon races got, and continue to be, despite proclamations otherwise, out of control.” Doc pulled the map out of his pocket and unfolded it. He nodded. “Follow me. Let me show you something.”

They walked down a side aisle, high rows of heavy metal shelving towering over them on each side, as if they were in a super-super-Costco. Doc halted in front of a house-sized white square. Power lines looped down to the top of it and machinery was humming. Doc went up to a window and wiped away frost on a piece of thick glass.

“Take a look,” Doc said.

Ivar, who had spent a lot of time in labs, had a hard time figuring out what the contraption was inside the container.

“It’s a nuclear weapon,” Doc said. “Once the Russians showed they had their bomb, President Truman, who I’ll get back to, demanded we build bigger bombs. Of course, he meant larger yield, but back in the late forties, larger yield literally meant a larger bomb. They used liquid deuterium as the fusion fuel—”

“Thus the requirement for it to be kept refrigerated.” Ivar couldn’t help resorting to playing a physics card.

“Of course,” Doc said. “This one was called Ivy Mike. Pretty much impractical as a weapon, as you can obviously see. But it had a big yield. Ten-point-four megatons.” He moved on to what was stored next to it. A large, cylindrical bomb, twenty-four feet long and six feet in diameter, rested in a metal cradle.

“They worked on making the bomb smaller,” Doc said, “and this was the first deployable, large-yield one they came up with. A Mark-17 thermonuclear bomb. It remains to this date the most powerful nuclear weapon ever built by the United States. Estimated yield around twenty-five to thirty megatons.”

“And we’re keeping one here in the Archives for…?” Ivar asked. “Isn’t that as stupid as the labs that keep the smallpox virus around?”

“And we keep this around for the same reason,” Doc said. “To study and understand. We keep a lot of deadly things in the Archives. Which answers your earlier question of why we need an Archive. Which brings me back to Operation Paperclip. While we led the way in developing, and using, nuclear weapons, the Germans and the Japanese led the way in other scientific fields associated with killing, particularly chemical and biological weapons.”

Doc tapped his chest as he led Ivar farther into the Archives. “We’ve faced down not only Rifts, but also nuclear weapons and some pretty serious biological and chemical mishaps over the years, including one or two cases of the smallpox virus you mentioned being played with in ways that weren’t smart or secure. You worked in a lab and look what happened there because your professor had visions of a Nobel Prize dancing in his head. He threw all caution to the wind and opened a Rift.

“You need to know the history of all of this. And you can come in here and study a lot of the things we, and our predecessors, have run into over the decades. I know Nada gave you a binder, but that has just an overview. The details, and they are important, are in here. In the original documents.”

Doc stopped in front of a missile pointing toward the roof. “A V-2 rocket. Mint condition. The Germans were the leaders in rocket development and if they’d had another year or so, the East Coast might have seen an advanced version of the V-2 rocket raining down from the skies. If the Nazi scientists had another two or three years, some of those rockets could have had nuclear warheads on them. Think about that. I like to think that every soldier who died storming those beaches in Normandy gave his life so we could stop that from happening.

“Of course, that’s the noble side of warfare. There’s another side.” Doc plinked one of the metal fins. “So at the end of World War Two, OSS operatives, along with intelligence officers from the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, a mouthful like many military organizations are, were sent into Japan and Germany. Sometimes they were actually snatching scientists away from army war crimes units. Sometimes they got in firefights with similar units from the Russian Army. The Brits also were in on it, although their efforts came nothing close to us and the Soviets.”

Doc glanced at Ivar. “The Russians have had their own version of the Nightstalkers for a while and we’ve done some joint missions together, but things were tense for a long time during the Cold War. There were times we suspected the other side of doing things that looked a hell of a lot like developing new weapons of mass destruction.” Doc shrugged. “And to be honest, I think it was true on both sides. We cleaned up our own messes and theirs sometimes. And they probably cleaned up some of ours in different places.”

“World War Two?” Ivar said, trying to keep Doc on track.

“The worst of the Nazi and Japanese scientists everyone was looking for were the ones who worked on biological and chemical weapons. While the United States was still stockpiling World War One mustard gas as its primary chemical weapon should the need arise, the Germans had perfected tabun, soman, and sarin and proven their effectiveness with ruthless use in the camps. The Japanese had also developed some nasty bugs at Unit 731 in Manchuria and used them on prisoners of all nationalities, sometimes vivisecting the subjects to study the stages of the diseases.”

“You’re shitting me,” Ivar said. “Vivisection of humans?”

Doc snorted. “I’ll give the Russians this: They at least tried a bunch of the people from 731 they captured. Sentenced most to labor camps in Siberia, which was, in effect, a death sentence. We gave the Japanese scientists we got a free pass in order to get the knowledge they had. The Japanese even have a memorial to Unit 731 in Tokyo.”

Doc moved on, deeper into the Archives.

“At the end of World War Two, President Truman signed an executive order banning the immigration of Nazis into the United States. He also signed the executive order forming Majestic-12. Sometimes orders can conflict.”

“No shit,” Ivar said.

Doc ignored him. “NASA got the rocket engineers. But the nuke, bio, chem guys came here to Area 51. Both the Nazis and the Japanese. Also, not even known by most of the Paperclip operatives, we were grabbing the leading physicists from Germany and Japan. It was a plan with a double edge — not only gain the expertise of these people, but also deny their own devastated countries their abilities. It’s taken over a generation for those countries to begin to redevelop their brain trust. And, of course, we wanted to keep them from the Russians.”

“And those physicists opened the first Rift,” Ivar said. “Here.”

“Correct,” Doc said. “That is why we are here and why you must know the history. The men who opened the first Rift were not good men. They were evil men.”

“And the ones who built Little Boy and Fat Man?” Ivar observed.

Doc stiffened in anger and then gave a sad smile. “The victor writes history.”

“What happened to the ones who opened the first Rift?” Ivar asked.

Doc stared at Ivar. “You’re the only person who has opened a Rift and didn’t die or disappear through it.”

“So did they die?”

“No. They disappeared. And a lot of soldiers and scientists died and disappeared trying to close the Rift. Those were the first Nightstalkers.”

“You’re giving me the eye like you want to vivisect me,” Ivar said.

Doc ignored him and moved on, then halted in an aisle bounded on both sides by modern filing cabinets. “Ms. Jones, in fact most of the Black Ops world, doesn’t trust computers. They don’t even trust paper records, as evidenced by the destruction of your own file. But they do accept that we need to keep some sort of historical record of what we do. And our research.” He waved a hand. “This is Section Twenty-Two-Charlie. The section on Rifts and Fireflies.”

Ivar was overwhelmed and excited at the same time. There were at least sixty drawer cabinets.

“Where should I start?” Ivar asked

“At the beginning,” Doc said, pointing to the left.

“You were dead for under a minute,” Nurse Washington said. The resuscitation cart was behind her, wires for the defibrillator dangling. “Only took one jolt to bring you back.”

Only took one jolt to kill me, Neeley thought. She was still on the floor, her chest throbbing with pain. She tried to lift a hand. “My phone.”

“Gone. Along with the man who came here to visit Mr. Schmidt, who I assume wasn’t his son. Mr. Schmidt is no longer among the living and was past bringing back. And I assume you’re not just an FBI agent. There’s a lot of people outside. Lots of police. Lots of people with black sunglasses. And”—Washington looked down at Neeley as if to judge how much more bad news she could handle—“an army helicopter crashed just down the road. Four dead. I figure that has some connection to you and the man who was here.”

Neeley closed her eyes. More dead and she’d failed. The number of ways in which she’d failed was as overwhelming as the pain in her chest.

“How long since the helicopter crashed?” Neeley asked.

“’Bout fifteen minutes,” the nurse replied.

“It won’t be long now,” Neeley whispered.

“Who loved you?” Hannah asked Moms.

Moms sat in the seat facing Hannah’s desk deep underneath the puzzle palace of the NSA, feeling very different than when she faced Ms. Jones at the Ranch. Jones was a known, after working together for so many years. Hannah, while Moms had heard rumors, was a wild card. Her youth and attractiveness disconcerted Moms. Hannah was everything that Moms wasn’t, physically, at least.

The one certainty was that the Cellar ruled all: the Nightstalkers and the cluster of other organizations, many of which Moms assumed she had no clue about or what they did.

The person and the setting were unsettling enough, but the question was bizarre.

“Why don’t you ask me who I loved?” Moms countered. “Can one really know if someone loves them?”

“You can save the question-answering-the-question for Dr. Golden,” Hannah said. “That’s shrink play.” She leaned back in her chair, steepling her fingers, regarding the woman across from her. “You receive a stipend every month. You went to see Mrs. Sanchez about it.”

They were not questions, so Moms followed a Nada Yada and said nothing.

Hannah continued. “She couldn’t help you. It’s a survivor’s benefit. Someone thought enough of you to put your name in that particular box on that particular form. It seems such a simple thing, filling out a form. But it isn’t for that form. The survivor benefits form is asking a person to rank-order those in their lives in case of their own death. But the ordering can have different meanings. For example, the man you call Kirk on your team, he rank-ordered his family. His siblings that he has to take care of. So much so, he took part of your team off the reservation on an unsanctioned operation.”

“That’s being dealt with,” Moms said.

“Yes, yes,” Hannah said. “Sending them like wayward schoolchildren to Fort Bragg. Do you know that what your Mr. Roland did with my agent Neeley in South America was the first time in years she’s ever brought someone on a Sanction with her?”

“So it was a Sanction?” This time it was a question.

“Of course. Neeley would never stray. But it crossed the line between Cellar and Nightstalker missions.”

“As you’re crossing them now going after Burns. And we already crossed when you brought me into the White House last year.”

Hannah smiled, revealing even, surprisingly white teeth. “Touché. The world is changing. Our areas of operations are increasingly overlapping. But that isn’t why I wanted to speak with you.”

Moms folded her legs and put her hands in her lap, like an obedient schoolgirl summoned to the principal’s office over the PA system. To be praised or punished, it wasn’t clear yet.

Hannah said, “Ms. Jones has a speech she likes to give your team. Why we are here.”

“You don’t have to repeat it,” Moms said.

“I’m not Ms. Jones and my reasoning is different from hers,” Hannah said. “People like us, you and me, we’re the broken ones. The ones not in the bell curve and not necessarily on the good side of the curve.”

“And we protect those inside the curve,” Moms said. “The average person who goes through their day not knowing how close they come to extinction. How many dangers are out there.”

Hannah smiled. “That there are boogie men in the closet.” She tapped her desk. “Do you know why I’m here?”

“To police the world of covert ops,” Moms said.

“On a base level, yes,” Hannah agreed. “But as you tend to go deeper with your own why we are here, beyond the Rifts and Fireflies to the Trinity Test as the start point for the Nightstalkers, I like to go back and examine history and determine why an organization like the Cellar was and is needed.”

Moms waited, ready to be schooled, because no matter how high up you went, someone was always there above you, and every once in a while you got called in.

She wondered who schooled Hannah.

“As you know, there is evil in the world,” Hannah said. “You focus on the abnormal evil. Rifts, Fireflies, and the sort. And other problems. Rogue scientists. Stupid scientists. Nature gone amok. But there is a much more insidious evil. The worst kind. The one that hides inside men’s souls. In the dark corners of their hearts. The latent evil, the truly dangerous inside of people, which the psychopaths can tap into. And that evil can spread rapidly among those who are not necessarily evil to begin with. I learned this the hard way as a young woman, being drawn into something terrible because I loved someone. Sometimes love can be turned, twisted.”

Hannah smiled at Moms’s expression. “Don’t look so shocked. We all had lives before we were sucked into this dark world we inhabit. I know that sounds simplistic, but if you look at some of the more dramatic examples in the past hundred years and then factor in the speed with which we can interact with each other now via digital means, the world has become a much more frightening place. Where evil people can spread their message much more effectively and quickly.

“We’ve had Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hussein, bin Laden, and others. When will the next version of those arise? Where? And how much more effective will they be with access to the Internet? I believe legends and dogma exist for a reason. The concept of an anti-Christ has its roots in a base fear we all have.”

Hannah tapped her desk once more. “The person who sits here has the power of life and death. Judge, jury, and then send the executioner on a Sanction. How different does that make me from those evil people?”

“Your motivation for what you do,” Moms said. “You’re protecting people from the evil.”

“Perhaps. I sometimes think,” Hannah said, “that if the Cellar had existed before World War Two, it might have been able to stop some of the carnage. Most likely not the war itself, but some of the horror perpetuated under the cover of the war.”

“Can you separate the two?” Moms asked.

Hannah sighed. “I certainly hope so.”

“You think the Cellar would have taken out Hitler?”

Hannah shrugged. “Perhaps. But we didn’t take out Hussein. So who knows?”

“War has never been clean,” Moms said. “I’ve seen it firsthand. I watched a sniper in Baghdad one time. A simple thing. Most Iraqis can’t swim, but they were fleeing us, trying to cross the Tigris. So there was a group. Five. Grabbed on to a large beach ball and were using it as a float to get across the river. A man, two women, and two children.

“And the sniper. He shot the ball, laughing as he did so. A ‘good’ American boy. From Nebraska or Idaho or one of those wholesome states. He watched those people drown. He put down his rifle and took pictures.”

“And what did you do?” Hannah asked.

“I almost shot him.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Because you are not evil. Was he?” Hannah asked.

“He was caught up in it. You do become inured to it. Callous.”

Hannah leaned forward. “Does that scab you cover yourself with grow thicker or thinner with time?”

Moms shrugged. “Depends on the person, I guess. Is that why you’re asking me about love?” Moms challenged. “I don’t want your job, by the way.”

“I plan on having my job for quite a while,” Hannah said.

“I don’t want Ms. Jones’s job either.”

“No one really cares what you want or don’t want,” Hannah said. She pulled open a drawer. She reached in and took out an object, which she placed on the desk, in clear view of Moms, whose legs quickly became uncrossed and hands became fists.

“Where did you get that?” Moms demanded.

It was a picture album, the kind you buy at Walgreens or K-Mart or more likely remaindered at the Dollar Store. Which is exactly where Moms’s mother had gotten it with her employee discount as a young teenager. It was obviously cheap, covered in fake imitation leather. Gold letters on the front read OUR WEDDING.

It was anything but a wedding album.

“Dr. Golden tracked it down,” Hannah said.

Moms absorbed the implications of that, which raised more questions than one sentence should. She tried to prioritize the questions in her mind, but Hannah didn’t give her the time.

“Yes, Dr. Golden was researching your background. Digging deeper than the ones who vetted your security clearance. After all, there is a large difference between being trustworthy with secrets and being trustworthy. Don’t you think.”

It was not a question, but a reminder.

Hannah continued. “Dr. Golden found it in an old storage unit one of your brothers had forgotten about with the rest of the stuff from your now-abandoned childhood home. Covered in dust and neglect. Which raises an interesting point: Do your brothers love you? Did they love you when you took care of them when your mother was incapable of action most of the time due to her intoxication?” She didn’t consult any notes. “You have not spoken to any of your siblings for over six years.”

“We don’t have siblings or family in the Nightstalkers,” Moms said. “I don’t believe you have them in the Cellar either.”

Hannah ignored that. “Who loves you, Moms?” She reached out and placed a hand on the album. “Your mother cut pictures from catalogues and pasted them in here while she was a teenager. A wish list for her life.”

Moms remembered the images her mother would stick on the old beat-up refrigerator, using magnets from the local feed lot to hold them in place. The album was the predecessor to the fridge.

It wasn’t a step up.

“A wish list,” Hannah continued, “that was ironically canceled by the wedding in front of the judge with no flowers or rings or anything in this book. A wedding you were present for, although certainly you can’t be expected to remember it. It’s why you see weddings, indeed all intimate relationships, as the end, not the beginning.”

“Is that shrink-speak? I thought I got that later with Dr. Golden?”

Hannah ignored her. “Then the pictures change. From the perfect wedding to places. Beautiful places all around the world from old National Geographic magazines.” Hannah flipped it open. “You had this up until eight years ago; then you gave it to your brother.”

“That’s private,” Moms said. There was an edge to her voice and she was leaning forward in the chair.

“Of course,” Hannah said. She looked up from the album and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “And, of course, you understand that’s almost the definition of irony saying that here, three hundred feet below the NSA? I can order you to go out and kill someone but you’re upset about a book that’s been gathering dust for years?”

“It’s personal.”

“And your life isn’t?” Hannah didn’t wait for an answer. “You used to check off these places, if you happened to have traveled to or through them and write notes to your mother about them. Postcards from the edge, literally, given some of your missions and assignments. Of course, you rarely traveled to the nice, exotic locales your mother dreamed of. Mostly hellholes, but there were some decent stops en route and on the way back.”

“She loved me,” Moms said, trying to stop Hannah.

“Not enough to stop drinking,” Hannah said. “Not enough to be a mother.”

Moms pointed at the book. “She gave me hope. She gave me purpose.”

“Rearing your brothers? Then traveling around the world killing people? It’s amazing what we get used to. For you, your life is sort of normal. Yet for a normal person your life is so far off the grid, they wouldn’t be able to comprehend it.”

Moms wasn’t giving in so easily. “She at least showed me a world beyond what we had growing up. A world she knew she’d never see but I could. Even if it means killing people,” she added bitterly.

“A world beyond that gray, flat Kansas horizon?” Hannah flipped the album shut. “Of more interest, and more importance, is who loved her? That’s where your allotment comes from.”

Moms sat back, some of the anger draining from her. “You know.”

“That’s what makes Mrs. Sanchez’s job so difficult and so important,” Hannah said. “Money leaves a trail. Many a Predator strike has resulted from following a money trail and Mrs. Sanchez is very good at that. She’s been responsible for quite a few strikes.

“The allotment is from a man who loved your mother. Before you were born. He wanted to marry her but instead she married your father. Not planned for in the album of her future life. It is a testament to your mother’s beliefs that you are here at all. But part of that was marrying that man. The man who put her in a very small world and kept her there.

“So the man who really loved your mother left. He went into the military. He couldn’t bear to stay in that town and see your mother still working at the Dollar Store, when she was able to make it to the job. It pained him to see her at all, so he left, and he eventually died in the service of our country. And he left the money to your mother so maybe she could see some of these places, but when he died, she was long since gone also, so it went to you.”

Hannah fell silent.

“Who was it?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Hannah swept the album off her desk and into the drawer and slid it shut.

“That’s mine.”

Hannah ignored her. She put her hands flat on the desk, and her dark eyes met Mom’s. “Who loved you? Loving someone, like you did your brothers and your mother and like you do your team, just gets you by. Most people go through life throwing love around to those they find worthy of it, but the real power is in who loves us. Because those who love us, they own a piece of us. They find us worthy.”

Moms was confused. “What do you mean?”

“Love is like electricity,” Hannah said. “When we feel it for someone, it’s grounded in our hopes and dreams. When someone loves us, it’s wild and free. Unleashed. It’s power without a ground. It can hurt us or help us. We have to decide which. The problem for you is that you didn’t have a you.”

“I imagine there’s a point to all this,” Moms said.

“I—” Hannah began, but then her desk phone trilled.

Hannah picked it up. She listened and Moms watched her face, searching for any tell.

There was none.

“Bring her to me once she’s been cleared,” Hannah said. “Where is the terminus of the Loop message?”

She listened and then issued a last order before hanging up. “Help the last relayer decrypt and send, then secure the Loop.”

Hannah hung the phone up. “It appears things are not as we would like. Neeley was not able to Sanction Burns.”

Moms stood. “My team—”

Hannah held up a hand. “I believe a message is being forwarded to one of your team members as we speak.”

“Where’s the demon core?” Ivar asked Doc as he slid shut the second drawer.

Doc looked up from the cabinet he’d been rifling through. “Ah, the dragon’s tail. The very first Rift.”

“The records are incomplete,” Ivar said.

“Of course they are,” Doc said. “Everyone who worked on it disappeared.”

Ivar shook his head. “No. I mean even the paperwork before they opened the Rift is wrong. Like they were hiding something.”

“They were Nazis and—” Doc paused, searching for the right word—“you know, there was never a word for those who followed the emperor of Japan into that war. Who perpetuated crimes as bad as the Nazis. Nanking. The Bataan Death March. Unit 731.”

“Japanese,” Ivar said.

“Yes, but we make such a distinction between Nazis and Germans sometimes. Was every German a Nazi? Was every Japanese responsible for those crimes?”

“The records,” Ivar said, thumping the drawer. “There’s very little on what this group, Odessa, was doing. The theoretical physicists.”

“Ah, yes,” Doc said. “Odessa. Does the name ring a bell?”

Ivar shrugged. “Not particularly.”

“Ask Eagle about it sometime,” Doc said.

Ivar tapped the drawer, getting back on track. “There’s some mention of the demon core.”

“From Los Alamos,” Doc said. “Majestic-12 appropriated the plutonium core from Los Alamos that killed Daghlian and Slotin. They nicknamed it the demon core because of those accidents.”

Every physicist knew of Daghlian and Slotin. Cautionary tales told early in their studies. “What was that thing about the dragon’s tail?” Ivar asked.

“Enrico Fermi told Slotin that playing with that core was like tickling the dragon’s tail and that the dragon was going to consume him. More like it farted when Slotin’s screwdriver slipped, but it was a radioactive fart and it killed him.”

“Where’s the demon core now?” Ivar asked. He looked about the Archives. “In some big lead box?”

“They never found it after the first Rift,” Doc said. “It was assumed that the Odessa group used it to open the Rift and it got sucked through with them.”

Ivar frowned. “But how come everyone who has opened a Rift since then hasn’t needed a plutonium core? Just algorithms?”

“Good question, isn’t it?” Doc said.

“But plutonium has a half-life of a little over twenty-four thousand years,” Ivar said. “Wherever it is, that core is still putting out a lot of radioactivity and potential power.”

“Let’s hope it’s frying whoever is on the other side of the Rifts,” Doc said, and then pointedly went back to looking at the file he’d just pulled out.

Wallace Cranston was standing at the craps table in the Bellagio losing his stash, his savings, and his shirt. He was thinking about going to the ATM to get the money he swore he wouldn’t get.

His wife’s money.

Even though doing that would most likely change that status to ex-wife. But he could feel it in his bones that his losing streak was just about up and he was going to hit it good.

Of course, he didn’t even know what day it was, never mind what time it was, but he was on vacation and breathing the lovely oxygenated air they pumped in, and he was on the fourth, or fifth, or sixth day of a fantastic bender, and he felt anything was possible.

He noticed the cleavage on the waitress as she handed him another rum and Coke, and he thought, Maybe even that’s possible, even though she had the dead eyes of one of Stephen King’s bad people from The Stand. Which reminded him he’d been to Boulder, Colorado, where the supposed good people had made their “stand,” and the locals there had been a bunch of liberal, stuck-up pricks, so he’d rather be here with the bad.

“It’s Vegas, baby,” he whispered to himself, then took a slug of his drink and started to weave his way toward the ATM. He bounced into it, then used one hand to claim it as an anchor as he pulled his wallet out. He fumbled through it for the cash card he’d swiped before leaving home, hoping his wife hadn’t canceled it already.

Then the phone that never went on vacation started to vibrate in his shirt pocket and chime with “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” which was more than appropriate here in Vegas. Cranston had a theory that people went to Vegas to die and to L.A. to suffer. He glanced back at the waitress with the dead eyes and thought, You’d like me better if you knew who I was.

Then again, maybe not.

He pulled the phone out and with surprisingly steady hands accepted the incoming text message. He saw the five letter groupings and knew he’d have to go back to his room to decrypt and forward.

He looked at the ATM and sighed. His wife would never know how close it came. Saved by the bell. By the ringtone. He started to giggle as he walked toward the elevator.

He loved his job.

And that was when the Men in Black appeared, seemingly out of the walls, one on either side, lifting him up off the ground, his feet still churning, searching for floor. They hustled him into the elevator. A third one, they all looked alike, took the phone and glanced at the screen.

“Do you have the decryptor?”

Cranston nodded. “In my room. I was gonna do it.”

“We’ll help. It’ll save time. You don’t want to get this wrong.”

Nada and Zoey were looking at the babies.

They weren’t supposed to be in the nursery. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY the placard on the outside door read, like that had ever stopped Nada from going anywhere. In fact, it was practically an invitation.

Nada checked his watch. They had three minutes before the nurse came by again. The staff had a rigid schedule, the bane of all security. They even had a little infrared thing they had to scan on a light on the wall to confirm they were doing their checks on time; someone thought the trinket added to the security of the place, when in reality it made the hospital all that much more vulnerable to those in the know. Nada knew he could have snatched every one of these little beasts, thrown them into a duffel bag, and been on the road before anyone noticed.

But that would be wrong. Probably even to think it was wrong.

“Hurry,” Nada said in a voice that said do anything but hurry to Zoey. He’d learned that was the best way to couch things with his niece. She still hadn’t quite forgiven him for the park incident and being abandoned to the police. She was stopping at each basinet and whispering baby talk and all sorts of gooey-gooey. A part of Nada suspected it was an act, designed to irritate him, so he feigned not being irritated.

Plus, it was the right thing to do, he supposed, not very up on baby talk. In fact, Nada was known for not being up on talking at all.

It was a bunch of babies, for frak’s sake, not the gold at Fort Knox. Was there an epidemic of baby stealing? For all he knew, there was, not having studied the matter.

He followed Zoey, peering over her shoulder at each one. There were some damn ugly ones, but he imagined everyone would lie and say “How precious,” “How gorgeous,” whatever it was people had to say about babies, because the parents had a lot vested in those little suckers. Nobody would look in and scream in dismay at the sheer ugliness of the bugger and predict it having a life full of pain and misery because of its looks. Whoever said beauty was only skin deep had none. It’s easy to diss what one does not have, Nada knew. He considered adding that to his Nada Yadas but didn’t see the point.

As he looked at each one, he wondered what kind of different people they’d turn into. Some were fretting and crying in their blankets, their tight cocoons of cloth unraveled, and he figured that’s sort of the way their life would turn out for them. Others were sound asleep, snug as bugs, their blanket tight around them. They’d live quiet lives, not making a fuss, security — another word for fear in Nada’s opinion — being their priority.

A few were staring around, not making a fuss, just observing.

Those were the dangerous ones. Just staring as if they already knew something was up, that they’d been dealt a hand, and they were just trying to figure out the cards. Something was going on and they wanted to know what it was. Several met his eyes, staring back as if challenging him. He foresaw great things and/or terrible endings for those particular babies.

He wondered where and how each would die. It was a morbid thought he’d never shared with anyone, not even Moms, but every time he’d killed someone, he’d later wondered if they would have lived their life differently if they’d known before about whatever shit-hole situation he’d had to kill them in, that that place and time would be their final moment?

He often wondered where he would meet his own end. A Nada Yada he didn’t share with others but that ruled his life was: Things will always turn out how you least expect.

Most likely, if he made it to old age, he’d die with Zoey standing nearby giving him grief.

Zoey cooed into another basinet and Nada looked over her shoulder. There was a big boy in it, his head covered with thick black hair and his eyes dark and wide open. They seemed to be staring right through Nada, even though he knew the eyes couldn’t focus yet. The baby couldn’t see him. So why was he staring at him? Nada wondered.

“Hurry up, Zoey,” he said. “The nurse will be here in thirty seconds.”

At the sound of his voice, the baby’s head moved, as if trying to zero in with his ears as well as the eyes that couldn’t focus. Nada put his big, calloused hand out, as if to stroke the thick hair, but he just waved it in front of the baby’s face and the eyes tracked it, which he found most fascinating. Movement could be noticed without focus?

Something to remember if he ever had to draw down on a newborn.

Stranger things had happened to him as a Nightstalker.

Zoey grabbed his hand, reversing roles. “Come on, Uncle. We gotta get out of here.”

But Nada suddenly wanted to stay. To whisper something to this boy, to leave some mark. There were great things ahead in this kid’s life. Nada didn’t know how he knew it, but he trusted it as much as he did when his gut told him he was about to walk into an ambush. He was still alive because he trusted that instinct.

There was a little blue bulb syringe at the foot of the baby, something used to clear his nose or put drops in his eyes or whatever hell maintenance on a baby required a bulb syringe. Nada instinctively grabbed it and stuffed it in his shirt. He followed Zoey through the door they weren’t supposed to come in. (No signs on this side about stopping intruders, he noted.) They slid through, scant seconds ahead of the nurse doing her rounds, as punctual as security on any firebase.

Nada felt the blue syringe in his chest pocket and it seemed to be extraordinarily heavy. Remembering the impulsive theft caused him to flush, although it would be hard to see against his pitted and dark skin.

He’d done wrong. A small wrong, but an unnecessary one.

And he didn’t know why.

But then his brother was there, bouncing up and down like a kid himself. “It’s a boy!”

He sounded a bit too excited about it in Nada’s opinion, considering Zoey was right there and she wasn’t.

A boy, that is.

“Come, come!” his brother said, turning and heading back down the corridor to the room where Nada’s sister-in-law had just given birth.

Zoey was excited too. Give her credit for playing along, Nada thought, running after her father. “Can I see? Can I see?”

Nada imagined he should be showing some sort of excitement, but his brother had already walked away, so he was spared the effort. He followed and his brother halted at the door.

“Only one at a time, Zoey,” his brother said. “Let your uncle go first. I know you won’t have much time,” he added, because Nada never had much time, it seemed.

“Is he crying?” Nada asked.

“No,” his brother said. “He’s just staring at everything. It’s really neat.”

Then Nada heard the ringtone, low but never silenced: “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.”

He had to go. Answer the call of duty, even the Loop.

Especially the Loop.

His brother made a face.

Nada felt the weight of that blue bulb on his chest.

Nada hit the mute button on the phone that was never muted and walked through the door to meet his new nephew. “Come on,” he said to Zoey, taking her hand and leading her into the room. “Rules are made to be broken.”

Burns was taking back roads, two-laners that wound through the Tennessee countryside. It wasn’t so much he wanted to avoid police or being noticed; it was that the manic atmosphere of the interstate bothered him on a level he couldn’t define. Everyone seemed in a rush, particularly the big trucks. As if getting there quicker would change the time spent.

In his life before, Burns had driven on the interstate without a care, in the same rush. That he felt differently bothered him because it meant he was different, but he didn’t know how.

He drove the speed limit. He passed what appeared to be a yard sale, except the items were scattered in front of an abandoned building, as if the residents had evacuated in the middle of the sale and just given up on everything. The despair was like a black hole trying to draw one in along the side of the road.

He passed through a small town and slowed down to the posted speed limit. He had the windows down and he heard children’s voices to one side. He pulled off the road and stared at the cluster of kids in a schoolyard.

Some were playing; some squabbling; some off by themselves.

Burns’s eyes began to shift color, gold spreading out from the pupils. The scene he was watching changed accordingly: Each child took on a color according to their emotions. Those arguing were a cluster of black; those getting along yellow; the ones who were alone were the most interesting because they were a rainbow of colors, reflecting whatever was running through their heads.

Burns was startled by a rap on the car’s window.

“What are you watching those kids for, boy?” a distinctly Southern voice demanded.

Burns’s head snapped around and the cop standing there took a step back in shock, seeing Burns’s eyes.

“What the fuck?” the cop said, his hand scrambling for his gun.

The cop was a towering mass of red and black in Burns’s vision. Full of rage and self-importance and the desire to hurt. Reflexively, a bolt of gold shot out of his eyes and hit the policeman in the chest, passing through his Kevlar vest, wrapping around his heart, and stopping it.

The man crumpled to the ground.

Burns started the car and drove way.

He heard the first scream behind him ten seconds later.

Moms’s phone rang and Hannah nodded, indicating she should answer it.

“Yes?”

“I got a message from Scout via the Loop,” Nada said, leading with the headline. “She says, and I quote, ‘Nada. Scout. In TN. We have a golden problem.’”

“Send the alert,” Moms said.

“As soon as I hang up.”

Moms looked at Hannah. “Hold on a second.” She put her hand over the phone. “Do you know where in Tennessee we need to go?”

“To find your little Scout?” Hannah asked. She shook her head at Moms’s expression of surprise. “We got the message the same time as Nada, which actually was about two minutes ago, so there is a curious time lag there. My secretary has been in contact with Ms. Jones, who, of course, being efficient, has been keeping tabs on your asset. She’s just outside of Knoxville, Tennessee. Ms. Jones is on top of this.”

“I assume this one is our mission?”

Hannah nodded. “Yes. It is.”

Moms spoke into the phone. “Ms. Jones has the intelligence. I’ll meet you at the objective. Out.” Moms headed for the door, then paused, looking over her shoulder. “Who loved you, Hannah?” she asked. Then she left, not waiting for an answer.

The rain had stopped a little while ago, so now it was just mud. Nice, thick, North Carolina mud.

The Nasty Nick was just a memory and the four Nightstalkers were in the midst of a long snake of camouflaged men, heavy rucks on their backs, marching down what once was a dirt road, now a mud river, through the pine forest that covered most of Camp Mackall.

No one knew how far they had to go, part of the mind games played in SFAS. This forced march could just be a loop back to Camp Rowe and chow, or it could last into the night.

Roland, Kirk, Mac, and Eagle had settled into the rhythm of rucking, which every experienced soldier has developed. They might be a bit older than the candidates around them, but they were more experienced. Some of those in the column, steam rising off of their drying fatigues, were not so fortunate. The obstacle course had taken its toll. Some with sprained ankles were fading through the ranks. Some, in not the best shape, were also fading. What the Nightstalkers knew, and what the others would learn, was that it wasn’t so much one’s physical conditioning that would make the difference but how badly one wanted it. Did they want to wear a green beret or be a Green Beret?

It was early enough in the selection process, still the first week, that their fellows sought to help the ones who were hurting. Weapons were taken to be carried by comrades, even some rucksacks. The Nightstalkers watched but didn’t contribute.

“They’ll figure it out,” Mac said, for once keeping his voice down so that only his fellow Stalkers could hear.

Roland laughed. “I carried three dudes’ rucks our first march here.”

“Figures,” Kirk said. “No one carried anyone else’s shit in Ranger school. Ever. We knew from the start.”

“Weren’t carrying anyone else’s by the end, were you?” Eagle asked Roland.

“Nope,” Roland confirmed. “Everyone’s got to pull their own weight.”

“They’ll figure it out,” Mac repeated.

“Company,” Kirk said, as always looking ahead.

The major, who had metal instead of feet, was waiting by the side of the road. He had on a freshly starched uniform that he’d pulled out of some magic bag and his boots were spit-shined, as if he walked above the mud, not through it. He held up a hand and Master Sergeant Twackhammer bellowed out, “Halt!”

The long line of camouflaged soldiers compressed unevenly to a stop. Several men leaned over, hands on knees, to catch their breath.

Twackhammer was walking along the line, making a mental note of those who showed weakness.

They’d be gone before the week was over.

The major came stalking over toward the Nightstalkers. He had a waterproof bag in his hand.

“Your phones are ringing, gentlemen.” He held it up and everyone could hear a cacophony of four phones blaring “Lawyers, Guns and Money” in sync.

“Thank you, thank you!” Eagle exclaimed as the four pushed their way out of the column.

Because even a Rift was better than North Carolina mud.

The major opened the bag and passed the phones out. “Learn anything?” he asked.

“One for all and all for one,” Mac said as he slipped the phone into his fatigue shirt. “Or something like that.”

“Didn’t that get you sent here?” the major asked.

Eagle nodded. “We learned what we needed to. There’s rules and there are rules.”

The major nodded. “There are indeed. A time and a place for everything. Good luck, gentlemen, and thanks for showing these”—he indicated the candidates—“that old men can keep it up.”

“I ain’t that old,” Mac muttered.

“And,” the major continued, “that brains count more than brawn.”

“I ain’t that brawny,” Eagle said. “But I got brains.”

“I’m brawny,” Roland threw in. He glanced at Eagle. “Right?”

“And”—the major wasn’t done yet—“that desire trumps all.”

When Doc left to go to one of the Porta Potties stationed throughout the Archives (no one ever had to go to the bathroom in the movies, Ivar reflected, and whoever designed the Archives hadn’t factored in that essential human element), Ivar ran over and opened his real target, a drawer labeled THE FUN OUTSIDE TUCSON. Ivar grabbed the hard drive that was sealed inside a plastic envelope. Someone had written CRAEGAN on it. He slipped it into his pocket and scurried back to where he was supposed to be. Deeper into the rabbit hole. Crossing the streams. His line of sayings was interrupted by a ringtone.

Ivar looked to the right. Doc was striding down the aisle, pulling out his cell phone, which was blaring “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” A second later, the phone Ivar had been issued began playing the same tune.

“New guys always seem to be alerted a second or two later on their first mission,” Doc said, slamming shut one open drawer and spinning the combination lock on it. “Let’s go.”

Scout was crouched next to the seawall, sneaking a smoke and watching the river. The guys working on the barge across the way were done for the day and cast off their little boat and puttered away, leaving the barge and pile driver anchored to the far shore.

Now all was calm.

Or at least appeared that way.

Like in those horror movies where everything seemed just fine, right before all the really, really bad stuff happened, Scout thought as she finished the cigarette and then field stripped it. She ground what remained into the ground, then looked up at the sky, as if expecting to see the parachutes of the Nightstalkers floating down toward her.

Nothing.

Plus, she had a feeling they were going to show up in a way she least expected.

Burns stopped the car in the northern parking area designated for viewing. The Fort Loudoun Dam, the first dam along the six hundred fifty-two miles of the Tennessee River, stretched 4,180 feet across the river. It was at the fifty-mile mark from the origin of the river on the eastern side of Knoxville where the Holston and French Broad Rivers joined together.

Formed behind the dam was Fort Loudoun Lake, covering over 14,600 acres. Which was the purpose. All that water, massed seventy feet above the down-dam side, was power. Gravity translated through water, translated through the three hydroelectric generators built into the power station on this end. They produced — Burns closed his eyes for a moment and focused, accessing the Internet via the phone he’d taken off Neeley — slightly over 155 megawatts of power at peak capacity.

The phone was very good, being a Cellar phone. It was untraceable. It had classified access to the government’s version of the Internet. And it had more on it.

Burns shivered.

He opened his eyes, the pupils glowing gold, and analyzed the dam. That was peak safe capacity.

They were going to need more. And he had to figure out how to accomplish that.

He smiled as he saw that the answer was right in front of him.

He looked to the east. But first he needed to buy some time.

Because they were coming.