sedona files - books one to three Page 15

  I risked a quick glance over my shoulder and saw him leaning forward in the space between the two headrests. To my surprise, he appeared far less irritated than his comment would have indicated.

  “Remote viewing?” I repeated, curious despite myself. I didn’t really expect him to answer me, but I couldn’t help asking, “Why did you leave?”

  “Saw more than I should have,” he said, and shot me a narrow-eyed look. It was almost as if he got some perverse pleasure in providing me with a reply when I clearly had been predicting that I would get none. “More than I wanted to.” A jerk of his leather-clad shoulder toward the red rock–rimmed canyon toward which we were headed. “And it was up there.”

  Even though the country around me was beautiful — staggering, actually — I shivered. Something waited out there, that much I knew. What exactly that thing was, whether aliens, MIBs, squads of Army Rangers, or what-have-you, I got the distinct impression it wasn’t going to be rolling out the welcome mat for the motley crew inside the UFO Night Tours van. And how we were supposed to get into what I guessed had to be some sort of heavily fortified facility, I hadn’t the slightest idea.

  “How is that possible, anyway?” Adam asked, turning in his seat to look back at Lance. At the same moment, the paved road abruptly gave way to dirt and gravel. The van lurched a bit, and I hung on to my armrest grimly and hoped the vehicle had decent tires and a sturdy suspension.

  Lance’s gray gaze shifted to Adam for a second before moving straight ahead once again. Although otherwise I couldn’t get a clear read off him, I did sense that Lance didn’t have much patience for Adam. “How is what possible?”

  “How can they be hiding some big operation up there, right under all our noses?”

  “Classic obfuscation. Most people think Boynton’s where the action is — as if the shadow government would be stupid enough to let someone build a resort right on top of its base — so no one pays attention to Secret Canyon.”

  “Shadow government?”

  Lance threw another sour look in my direction. “You really don’t know anything, do you?”

  “Well, not having spent the past five years hanging out on conspiracy theory websites — ”

  Michael broke in, his clear, deep tones overriding my rebuke. “The evidence does seem to indicate that there are elements within the government working independently of its charter. These elements have their own agenda.”

  “Including colluding with aliens?”

  A grave nod. “If it suits their purpose.”

  Maybe I was just being naive, but I couldn’t understand how people in the government would be willing to betray their fellow human beings. After all, this wasn’t like selling secrets to the Russians or something. “So you’re trying to tell me that people funded by our taxes are working behind the scenes to enslave their own people? That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  “Obviously, you don’t get out much,” Lance remarked. “There are plenty of people in the government who don’t think the American public has the smarts to wipe its own ass. They’ll sell them out in a heartbeat if it means gaining more power or furthering their aims.”

  “Don’t forget about the technology — you know, like the Aurora Project,” Kiki put in from the front seat. At least she had her gaze more or less directed forward, but I still worried she wasn’t paying enough attention to the road. “The aliens trade bits of technology for access and staging areas — like the hidden base up in Secret Canyon.”

  It would have been nice if she hadn’t kept bringing up all this stuff as if it was supposed to be common knowledge. I remarked, my tone a little sourer than I had intended, “It can’t be that secret if you all know about it.”

  Lance shrugged. “We spend our time digging. Most people don’t. And it’s not as if Secret Canyon is off-limits. People hike there, but it’s a rough trail. And more often than not they don’t make it all the way up the trail.”

  “Too steep?” I asked, even though I knew that probably wasn’t the reason.

  “Let’s just call it bad vibrations. That’s something a psychic can relate to, right?”

  Something almost made me respond that if he was in the remote viewing program, then he must be a psychic, too, and what was with all the sarcasm? But then I realized the last thing we needed was to keep sniping at each other. Too much was at stake. We had to work as a team…even if Lance was as prickly as one of the cacti that lined the road around us.

  So I just lifted my shoulders and stared ahead as well, watching as we bounced and jounced over the unpaved road and slowly climbed higher. On every side the red rocks seemed to close in, as if looming over us. I hated to admit it, but Lance was right. Something about the place just felt wrong, and we weren’t anywhere near our destination yet. It was beautiful, yes, but beautiful in a deadly way, like the web of a black widow spider.

  I wondered if we’d be able to escape that web.

  None of us spoke for a minute or two. Maybe they’d all sensed the same thing I had, or maybe they were just picking up on what was a galloping case of the heebie-jeebies.

  “What did you see?” I asked finally. “What made you quit?”

  Surprisingly, he grinned. The expression changed his whole face; I realized he wasn’t as old as I had originally thought he was…maybe ten years or so older than I. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

  “Haven’t got the time.”

  “Fair enough.” Lance paused, and I could actually feel the consciousnesses of the other passengers in the van focusing in on him. I realized then that they’d never heard the whole story, either, that Lance had never been one to reveal much of himself.

  “I suppose it’s only fair you know what you’re heading into,” he said. “I don’t need to go into the whole story — let’s just say that remote viewing is all about staying extremely focused, about finding the target. But after I’d been in the program for a couple of years, I started breaking focus, tracking someplace I shouldn’t have been looking. I don’t know why. Up until then I’d been one of the program’s top agents. You weren’t supposed to do what I was doing.”

  “Which was?” Kiki asked from the front seat. Her eyes were shining as she looked back over her shoulder at Lance.

  “Eyes ahead,” he admonished. “If I’m going to die today, I don’t want it to be because you ran this crate off the road.”

  “Fine.” But although her tone was sulky, she did as he directed and pointed her gaze forward, over the increasingly treacherous dirt-paved lane, which was barely large enough for one vehicle at that point. God help us if some hikers were coming down Dry Creek in the opposite direction.

  “Anyway,” Lance continued, “I kept seeing some sort of facility, apparently underground. Scientific base, I thought — there were a lot of white lab coats. Didn’t think much of it at first…until I got a better look at the men who were guarding the base.” He paused, eyes narrowing as if at some unpleasant memory. “They all had the same face.”

  He couldn’t have meant.... Twisting in my seat so I could look at him more or less directly, I said, “You don’t honestly expect me to believe — ”

  “Yeah, I do. Clones. They could have been the same man sent through a photocopier or something. At first I just thought I wasn’t seeing correctly — remote viewing’s not really like watching a movie projected in your head, you know — and I thought I was giving them all the same face because I wasn’t getting enough detail. But it kept happening over and over, and I started seeing more, and I began to understand what was going on. They weren’t men. They were hybrids.”

  “Human-alien hybrids?” Kiki demanded, and bounced up in her seat like some middle-school girl who’d just been told the latest teen heartthrob was coming to visit her homeroom class. “For real?”

  “Both hands on the wheel.”

  “They are!”

  For some reason I had the urge to burst out laughing, the juxtaposition between her girlish excitement and La
nce’s dour revelations was so extreme, but I managed to hold it in. I doubted Lance would be encouraged to continue if I began giggling uncontrollably.

  Still, I couldn’t really believe what he had just said. Sure, I knew aliens existed, and were plotting against us, but there were lines where the borders of complete insanity were crossed, and as far as I was concerned, we had just driven over one of them. “Really? This isn’t The X-Files.”

  “I’m well aware of that.” He sent me another one of those sideways irritated stares. “I’m telling you what I saw. And what I saw wasn’t human. The hybrids were just part of it.”

  “You saw…them?” Adam asked. Unlike his girlfriend, he had no need to watch the road, so he had turned around in his seat so he could more or less see the rest of us directly.

  “Sometimes. But even those glimpses were enough to tell me they were involved, and heavily. Took me awhile to figure out where all this could possibly be going down, and once I’d gotten what I thought was the truth, I knew I had to leave the program. Couldn’t risk my supervisors learning what I’d seen. I had to let them think I’d just burned out.” Another one of those shrugs, somehow eloquent in its resigned simplicity. “So I took off, but I kept researching what I could. And it became clear pretty fast that the times I’d seen aliens at the base were the times that correlated with high levels of UFO activity in the region. They can cover their tracks a lot of the time, but there are just too many eyes looking at the sky in this part of the world.”

  “Wow,” Kiki breathed, even though she’d apparently learned enough not to glance back. “So they’re holding Paul Oliver in a base full of aliens and hybrid clones?”

  “Probably.”

  “That is so cool.”

  I wished I shared her appraisal of the situation. About all I could hope for was that this happened to be one of the times when our little gray friends weren’t hanging around. Hordes of blank-faced clones were bad enough without tossing a bunch of aliens with unknown powers and abilities into the equation.

  “And we’re all just going to go barreling in there in our Scooby van and save the day?” I asked.

  For a minute, Lance didn’t say anything, but only stared past me, his gaze turned curiously inward. Then he smiled again, but this time the expression didn’t reach his eyes. “No. It’ll be just the three of us when the time comes — Michael, and me…and you.”

  My stomach dropped to somewhere in the vicinity of my feet — which were still covered in my Kohl’s flats and not hiking boots, unfortunately. But I made myself think of Paul, alone in that cell, with that inky bruise distorting his eye, and the livid traces of another contusion painting his jaw, and I knew I didn’t have any choice.

  For Paul, I was willing to risk everything.

  The road ran out a few minutes later, and Kiki limped the van over to a hiding place behind a clump of scrubby juniper trees. I shoved my purse under my seat and hoped I’d be in a position to retrieve it when all this was over.

  Everyone climbed out of the van, and I could tell by Kiki’s furrowed brow that she was less than thrilled about being left behind.

  “Adam and I can help, you know. I’ve hiked these hills — I know what I’m doing!”

  “This isn’t just a hike, Kiki,” Lance said. For some reason, his tone sounded almost gentle. “Besides, what would I say to Kara if something happened to you?”

  “And what am I supposed to tell Kara if something happens to you?” she shot back.

  I never thought I’d see Lance looking embarrassed, but he did appear distinctly uncomfortable. “Hopefully, you won’t have tell her anything.”

  “Hmpf.”

  It could have been my imagination, but I thought Adam, who hovered a few inches behind Kiki’s left shoulder, seemed almost relieved about being left behind. I guessed his enthusiasm for chasing UFOs didn’t extend to infiltrating underground bases staffed by human-alien hybrid soldiers.

  I couldn’t really blame him.

  Michael had been silent for some time. Now he stood a few paces away from the rest of us, watching the looming red rock cliffs with intent dark eyes, as if he saw something hidden there that the rest of us had overlooked. “I know the way.”

  “I figured you would,” Lance said.

  The older man didn’t smile, but only nodded. “Forty years of climbing these hills helps.”

  Of course I didn’t have that sort of background. I didn’t think the few times I’d gone hiking in the Hollywood Hills with one of my exes counted as experience with this sort of expedition. I tried not to look down at my completely inadequate footwear, instead brought up the mental image of Paul in that cramped little cell.

  “Lead on, then,” I said, a little more heartily than I’d intended. I guessed I wasn’t fooling anyone.

  “You’re brave. That’s good.” And Michael turned and began moving.

  Brave? That was a laugh.

  Lance looked almost as if he were about to comment, but instead just shook his head and followed in Michael’s footsteps. I noticed how both men seemed to find a way to jog from scrub brush to scrub brush, effectively hiding their movements. I certainly wasn’t trained in the field, but at least they were giving me a good example to follow. I moved after them, then paused for a second to turn back toward Kiki and Adam.

  “Keep the motor running,” I said, and Kiki, who’d been looking rather sulky, flashed me a grin.

  “Aye-aye, captain.”

  The ground sloped upward at a somewhat alarming angle. I’d known we’d have some rough terrain to climb, but I hadn’t realized how quickly it would grow treacherous, how soon the relatively flat land where the road had ended would transform itself into rough slopes cut into gullies by years of rain and weather, how the rocks would give way under my feet, leaving me scrabbling toward the next semi-level spot before I lost my balance completely.

  True, I was making the climb in more or less practical flats and not a pair of Louboutin platform pumps, but it was all a matter of degree. Once or twice Lance’s hand shot backward at the last moment before I slipped completely and went ass over teakettle; I couldn’t help noticing that both he and Michael wore heavy-treaded hiking boots, the sort of things my friends and I had derisively referred to as “waffle-stompers” back in our middle-school days. Still, I could see they were a necessity here, allowing the two men to find purchase in the scree, and I was definitely thankful for Lance’s helping hand.

  And all along that sensation of cold seemed to work its way up my spine, a perception of some wrongness that plucked at the very molecules in the air. For all his insouciance, I could tell Lance felt it, too. His brow furrowed more than ever, and droplets of sweat that had nothing to do with the chilly day glistened across his brow. And Michael, who climbed as quietly and methodically as a machine, also appeared to be sensing it as well, because once or twice he stopped and thrust his chin upward, as if scenting the air, and then shook, for all the world like my shepherd-mix Elsie used to do back when I was a kid and she crossed a smell she didn’t like on her evening walk.

  For myself, I’d like to say I was concentrating so hard on not falling off the side of the mountain that I didn’t have time to sense any bad vibrations or evil vapors or whatever you wanted to call them, but that was far from the truth. The day was cool, but not cold, and I should have worked up a sweat with the way I was exerting myself. Instead, my hands trembled from a chill I couldn’t shake, and the back of my neck was a prickled mass of gooseflesh. The chill I’d sensed emanating from the hybrids back in Raymond’s lab seemed to be intensified tenfold now that I was in the heart of their territory. Whatever we were climbing toward, it was something that every sense in my body — including my sixth one — told me I should be trying to avoid at all costs.

  But the heart never listens to common sense, so I pressed on, ignoring the waves of cold flowing over me, the sensation that seemed to build as if an actual physical force pushed back against my every step.

  Michae
l paused and looked back at Lance and me. “You feel it?”

  Wordlessly, we both nodded.

  “They’re powerful.” Again his chin went up, his profile craggy as the red rocks against the mottled spring sky. Incongruously, he grinned. “But so are we. This way.”

  He led us down a narrow little ravine dotted with wind-ravaged juniper, manzanita, and small pincushion cacti. It narrowed as we approached, and then the sky was blotted out as gnarled evergreens met overhead, effectively enclosing us in a living cave.

  “Hope you know where you’re going,” Lance commented, his breath sounding a little ragged. I didn’t know whether it was from exertion or from the oppressive atmosphere around us. Maybe both.

  “You can’t assault the front gates with only three soldiers,” Michael said. “And so — the back door.”

  And that’s just what it was — a metal door set into the hillside, halfway obscured by a particularly tenacious manzanita specimen that had taken up residence directly above its lintel.

  “And I suppose they’ve just left it unlocked,” Lance said, with a curl of the lip.

  “No need,” Michael replied, and looked over at me.

  “What?”

  “You must open it, Persephone.”

  I fought back the urge to laugh. “Um, Michael, I hate to break it to you, but I’m a psychic, not a Jedi Knight.”

  “I know that,” he said imperturbably. “And it doesn’t matter, as long as you believe in your need to free this man.”

  When he put it that way…

  I approached the door and stared at it for a long moment. It looked like something left over from a Cold War–era fallout shelter, with one of those metal wheels in the center that you’re supposed to turn to get the door to open. Only I knew it had to be locked from the inside. Who builds a top-secret base and leaves the back door open?

  Might as well humor Michael…not that I had any alternatives to present, besides going around to the front entrance — wherever that was — and inquiring whether they were done with Paul Oliver and if I could have him back, please?