CHAPTER FOUR
Gabriel Bleak, two weeks after his thirteenth birthday.
He was living with his parents, in eastern Oregon. His parents had caught him at it out in the barn, that night. Could be they had expected to catch him masturbating over a girlie magazine, or smoking marijuana cadged from his young Native friends on the Rez, or feeling up some drunken local girl.
But this...
He had been a kid living alone with his folks on a ranch, just trying to keep up with homework and Future Farmers of America meetings—he'd always found being around animals soothing—and getting into rock 'n' roll, and starting to look at girls a lot more: his eyes drawn to their hair floating in the wind, their thighs on the desk chairs at school, the pale, glossy curve of their shoulders when they wore sleeveless blouses, the sudden parabolas of their new breasts; noticing the color of that girl's eyes for the first time, noticing that she'd started painting her nails.
He'd been a kid reading Marvel comics and Conan and Horatio Hornblower novels; just a kid watching war movies on late-night television. Always drawn to the military.
Why? What was it about the military?
But he knew, on some level. Later, grown-up, he'd work out the why of it: if you were a good soldier, you were part of something bigger, locked into a kind of family. A tough, ritualized, formalized masculine family. They had to accept you, if you did your job. Even if they sensed something was strange about you.
He never felt really fully connected to his parents. Not after his brother vanished. And after that day, two days past his turning thirteen, he hadn't felt accepted by them at all.
He went to church with his parents—there were devout Lutherans—but never felt a connection there, either. Not the kind other people felt. Feeding a new calf with a bottle, that gave him a feeling of connection. And there was that other connection, to the unseen, that was on the edge of his awareness...tingling there. Not coming into focus. Not till that night.
That night in October, Gabriel Bleak, a boy of thirteen, lay atop his bedclothes, still dressed except for his shoes, trying to read Spenser, The Faerie Queene, for extra credit at school—Miss Williver, his English teacher, had talked him into it. He was surprised that he liked it. He was just lying there reading the part that went
And forth he cald out of deep darknes dredd
Legions of Sprights, the which, like little flyes
Fluttering about his ever-damned hedd
Awaite whereto their service he applyes,
To aide his friendes or fray his enemies...
And it gave him a peculiar feeling, reading those lines. Out of deep darknes dredd legions of Sprights. Not a feeling of dread, himself, but a sense of recognition both thrilling and unnerving.
He wished he had someone he could talk to about that. Other kids worried about talking about sexual feelings. The Bleaks bred animals, and there wasn't much mystery there. These other sensations troubled him. That tingling around the edges. Something's there, unseen. Waiting.
He found himself drifting into a familiar fantasy of talking to his brother. Who was gone, dead ten years now. But now and then, he liked to pretend his brother was there to talk to. He imagined saying, “Hey, Sean, I wish you could read this book, it gives me this feeling like the stuff that's so...that I can feel but I don't know what it is. Gives me those moments where I feel like if I'm somebody else than what people think, like that might still be okay. Like it's part of this world. Faerie, he calls it. He makes it seem like it's its own world and part of this one too. Not that I'm a fairy, dude, but...there's something there, it's like he knew...”
He caught himself. Stop doing that! Dumb to pretend. Man, you 're just a dweeb with an imaginary friend. He wished he had a real, living brother or sister. He had a few faint memories of that other boy, his fraternal twin. Fainter every year since Sean had been killed, so his dad had told him, when they were not yet three. Some accident Gabriel hadn't witnessed. His folks were vague about it. A tractor. The boy playing unseen under the wheels.
Anyway he was gone, and Gabriel was used to that. But there was an absence in his life, an absence he could feel physically, at times. If Sean had lived, Gabriel would have had a sibling with, perhaps, the same feeling of being undefmedly different. Someone who could relate to feeling as if yows had only one foot in this world. But death had taken Sean before his brother had quite understood Sean was really there as an individual. Gabriel had accepted him as part of the world like the furniture, the sky, the ground underneath, his own left hand. And then he was gone.
Sure, Gabriel had some friends—a couple of others who seemed a little “off were drawn to him. Chester and Anna Lynn. Drawn to him, maybe, because he accepted them; maybe too because he sometimes protected them. And there were a couple of Indian brothers, off the Rez. Joel and Angelo, he'd see them at the rodeo, at the county fair, or on the street when Gabriel rode his bike into town. They hung out and talked, sometimes.
But he never felt there was anybody he could really open up to. How would he explain? 'See, there's something in me waiting to come out, it visits me in dreams, and it's always there, kinda invisible, looking over my shoulder, and I keep thinking someone is going to realize I'm not really part of this world. I have to work hard to feel part of it. It's like I'm supposed to be somewhere else wherever I go. But it's really hard to explain.”
People would think he was bipolar. Which is something he'd read up on, when he started to be afraid he might be crazy, himself. One time he started talking to a guy in town, a nineteen-year-old, Connor, outside the drugstore. Connor was a notorious local eccentric.
“Hey, Gabriel, what you doing, you gotta Hershey bar, huh? Can I have a bite?...Thanks. What's up? Hey, can you feel the vibes right now?”
Gabriel had looked at him with interest. “Feel...which exactly?”
“That feeling like the ray coming at you, that you can feel in your bones and...”
“Well. Sometimes.” Could this guy really feel what Gabriel felt? “Something kinda like that. Not exactly, it's more all over the place. I mean—”
“And it's from the agents, they're beaming them at us from orbit, it's in those satellites, and they put voices in your head that tell you to do things?”
“Uh...” From orbit? Voices?
“The beams come right through those faces in the clouds. The faces are from the rays.” Gabriel had winced at that. “Urn...no. I meant something else. You can keep that Hershey bar.” He left quickly, realizing that Connor was just plain mentally ill, really was bipolar, or paranoid schizophrenic. Gabriel Bleak never imagined conspiracies against him, never seemed to get “special
messages” from television, the way mentally ill people did—like Connor. The only message he got from TV was that he should buy something.
When he'd turned thirteen, Gabriel had written in his diary:
I must have some particular mental problem, that somebody could diagnose, not like Connor but something else. Something that lets me use my mind pretty reasonably, but the disease part is like I just have this feeling of knowing there's some kind of invisible world and being part of it and it's really a form of mental illness that I'll probably find in the books some day. That really sucks. Big-time.
I think my mom and dad know there's something wrong with me. Mom acts like she loves me but it's like she's scared of me too. My dad goes quiet when I'm around. He used to tell me things about the world and ranching, but a couple of years ago he just stopped talking to me unless I ask him a question, and then when he answers he only says what he has to.
Maybe I'm imagining all this stuff. But if lam, why? What does that mean?
***
GABRIEL TRIED TO READ a little more Edmund Spenser. But he was soon seized with a restlessness, laid the book down on the quilt, and stared up at the slanted, white ceiling of his room—he was in an attic room, converted to a bedroom. He had a larger bedroom downstairs but he liked the view out the window from up here. His father had seemed relieved to agree, had even painted the walls for him. Only later had it occurred to Gabriel that the move to the attic room put him farther away from his parents.
Once, when he'd got up to go to the bathroom, he'd heard them talking late at night, downstairs in the kitchen. He'd stood in the darkness at the top of the stairs, listening for a minute. Hearing his mom say, “I just think he's lonely.”
“You know what could happen. They could take him. And why? What's happening...happening right now, to...”
“We agreed not to talk about that—that boy is gone, sweetheart, and we...don't talk about that.” “Maybe they did something to him.... Maybe right now.” “Please. Don't. Just...talk to Gabe.”
“I try. But I feel like he's looking right through me...1 want to talk to Reverend Rowell about it, but I don't see how I can.” “Quiet, I think he's up.”
Had they really been talking about him? Had he heard them right? The next morning he'd awakened, remembering the overheard conversation, and wondered if he'd dreamed it.
Now, as he lay there looking at the ceiling, the wind pushed at the house, sighing, shivering the window glass. Something about its sighing reminded him of when Johnny Redbear had come over from the Rez, had called up softly to his window, late at night. Wanting him to come out and drink some liquor he'd stolen from his old man. Gabriel had refused, afraid of getting caught, but he'd been tempted. Not so much by the liquor. By the adventure. By a voice calling from outside his window. Come on out, Gabe, come out. He liked that. Someone out there wanting him to come out and push out the limits.
The room was warm, tonight; the wind whining at the house wasn't cold. Sometimes there was an electricity in the air before a storm, a charge that seemed to come with a warm wind. Kind of felt that way tonight. On a night like that sometimes you could see a white fire dancing along the lightning rod over the barn, a pulse of energy in the darkness. Maybe if he went to look, he would see it now.
The house faced west, and so did his bedroom window, under the highest peak of the roof. The barn was north and east. He could see the lightning rod if he climbed onto the lower roof under his window.
“North. North and east. Look to the north. “ A voice, like a whisper. Barely audible, in the sigh of the wind.
He shook his head. Imagining stuff. From reading that book.
Maybe he shouldn't go look. Maybe he shouldn't go outside at all tonight.
“The way is opening. “
“Shut up,” he said aloud. Maybe he was turning into whatever Connor was, after all. Losing it.
But when the wind rose again, he thought he heard a distant singing, voices singing something he. couldn't make out, the sound rising and fading...like if you heard people singing a hymn in a church a ways off. Only this wasn't a hymn.
He snorted at himself, but he got up, went to the wood-framed window, opened it quietly as he could. A warm, searching, alfalfa-fragrant wind came in, rattling his posters: Green Day and Nirvana and the U.S. army recruiting poster. The alfalfa had been harvested but the scent lingered over the fields; and now, the window open, the perfume of reaped stalks of grain filled his room. Alfalfa and dust. Don't fear the Reaper.
He started to climb out the window—then thought better of it and went to get shoes. He put on his Converse sneakers, went back to the window, climbed out onto the porch roof, feeling as if he were climbing right up among all those stars crowded overhead. He steadied himself with a hand on the eaves against the wind and looked toward the barn. Was that a ghostly glow on the barn's lightning rod? He could hear the Guernseys mooing in there. And a distant thunk as one of the two horses kicked at its stall. They were restless too.
The door to the barn was partly open. It seemed extra dark in there, as if the darkness had thickness and weight. But was that a pulse of light in the middle of the black? And then—the deep darkness again. Bits of hay swirled at the entrance in a little whirlwind.
He could just go downstairs, tell his dad he was going out to check on the stock. But he didn't want to see his parents right now. He felt that they'd find something out about him, see it in his face, if he went. Like he was ashamed.
What did he have to be ashamed of? Nothing. Still...
Chorused voices—unintelligible, all singing the same song but in a hundred different languages... discordant and concordant, disharmony and harmony. What was that?
He went to the corner of the porch roof, careful, aware of the pushing wind; he knelt and climbed down, hanging on to the gutter by his fingers so it bent a little. Letting go, dropping to the ground. Dropping far enough so it stung when he landed on his feet, tipping over at the impact.
But he was up immediately, dusting off his rump, trotting toward the barn. It seemed to him as if he were standing still and the barn was coming toward him, almost rushing at him.
He crossed to stand just outside the barn door, peering inside. Smelled hay and grain and manure; the animals shuffling their feet, lowing.
What was he here for, again? The lightning rod? Or was there something else?
He took a couple steps back, looked up at the vertical rod on the roof, a dull silver streak aimed at the stars above the open hayloft. Maybe there was a glimmer along it. Maybe not. “Enter and turn to the north.... No one can hear us, but you. “
Maybe someone on the highway was playing a car radio. Only, the highway was almost a quarter mile away.
He should go back to bed. But he was drawn to step into the barn.
No, it wasn't that he was drawn, like, against his will; it was like he was finding his will for the first time. It felt like he was finally moving into the real world. Like one of those big jungle cats raised in a zoo—escaping into the woods for the first time.
Beyond the stalls, the barn had a smaller back door that led into a corral. A light shone from beyond that door. It wasn't a color he'd ever seen before—when he thought it was red, it was blue; when he thought it was blue, it was green. But it was none of those. It was more of a prism effect, like when he tried to see inside a little diamond his mom had on a necklace.
The cows were nervously mooing, stamping in their stalls; the horses were whinnying, goats bleating.
He walked toward the back door—and stopped, looked out on the corral. Stared in amazement. A tsunami of sullenly glowing liquid, looking like molten wax, was coming at him. It was coming from the north, swallowing up the horizon.
Fear spiked in his heart, but another feeling, of relieved belonging, of exotic enticement, was stronger. And that delicious sensation kept him rooted to the spot, listening to that multitudinous singing, louder and louder, roaring more dissonantly as the slow-motion tsunami approached.
The silvery molten sea was languidly pouring through a breach in a giant transparent wall, beyond the corral and the graveled private road; coming through the spillway in a see-through dam, thundering as it came. The wall went up high, its top hidden in mist. The wave coming through the breach was the expression of a living sea of force, in which figures took shape and collapsed, the way waves and currents surge up and diminish in the ocean. The figures were people—and were other creatures. Some of them seemed angelic and some diabolic, but more of them were without category. He was seeing the Hidden.
Gabriel knew that he was seeing the image symbolically—what was really coming was beyond the capacity of his senses. His mind had formulated this breached-dam image so he could come closer to comprehending it. A way to visualize the release of a worldwide sea of living energy.
He watched in horror and fascination as the slow-motion wave of mind-energy rushed toward him. Had just time to think, I should run. I should hide from this!
But he wasn't going to run. On some deep level, he knew he belonged in it. He was like a fish in an aquarium, rejoicing as it sees a flood pour into the house, the flood that will set it free.
And the onrushing tidal wave of the Hidden reared over him, a glassy wall of liquid energy...and crashed down all about him.
He expected it to knock him about, sweep him off his feet...but he felt something in his nerves, his spirit, his mind, not so much with his outer body...except for that crackling that lifted his hair to wave about his head like electrified seaweed; that raised goose bumps on his skin.
The currents of energy surged around him and he waited to die from its intensity, but instead he felt energized, finally completed by this new, living medium. The singing he'd heard was the sound its collective surging made; it was its equivalent of the sound of breakers. The singing was shaking the world, all around him, a surging cacophony of half-formed thoughts, ideas, possibilities. It was always there, usually unheard.
He felt the presence of countless other beings, in this new medium—and something else, the potential for beings who weren't quite there yet. He saw spirits loom up, like ethereal otters in an etheric sea, felt them looking him over. He knew, somehow, that these visitors were kept back from ?' him by an emanation generated by his own body—generated without his having to try. His just being alive and conscious here was enough to keep them back. For these beings, anyway. Certain others, more powerful and brutish, might overwhelm that protective emanation, if they came upon him. Might engulf him, devour him.
But one being in particular spoke to him; an entity emanating no threat.
“Reach out, “ said the voice. A voice with sheer trustworthiness innate in its timbre.
He remembered Connor. “I'm hearing things,” Gabriel said. “This is hallucination stuff. Hearing voices.”
“Some hear voices generated from their own faulty thinking matter, “ said the voice from the charged air about him. “Most who suppose they hear the unseen only hear themselves. But you are not
like the others. You've always known that. You can feel that I am trustworthy. You have the taste for things that are true. So listen to me. Reach out with your other hands...your inner hands. “
It came to Gabriel naturally, like a baby's first attempt to pick things up with its fingers— clumsily at first. Still, he reached into the luminous surging of the Hidden and felt it respond, something like clay in his fingers, but more malleable, less definable; he extended the energy field he was giving off, used it to manipulate the field, to extend himself telekinetically, enfolding the object nearest to hand: a pitchfork, leaning on the cobwebby wall beside him.
And made the pitchfork lift up into the air. It hung there quivering, its tines thrumming like a tuning fork...then dropped with a clang.
“The energy of the Hidden is condensable, “ said the voice. “Make a ladder, like Jacob, and rise up!”
He compressed the energy field in front of him—and stepped up onto the energy compression.
To find that he was standing in the air, hovering two feet over the ground.
He was dumbfounded and yet, on some level, not surprised. This was what he'd always unconsciously known was there; this was the missing part of himself. This was the real world, to him.
“It is always there, but your connection to it has been locked away, muted. The device that has hidden it from humanity is weakening, and those with the gift can feel the living radiance rise.”
“Who's talking to me?” Gabriel demanded, as he hovered there. “Who are you!”
As if in reply, the shape of a man formed before him, naked but sexless; the body, Gabriel knew instinctively, was a formality. It could have taken the shape of an octopus or a giant rabbit named Harvey or a Coca-Cola bottle. But just now it was solidifying, shaping to resemble a medium-size man, the body molded of the shining medium that swirled around him. The entity's “head” seemed detached, floating over the neck. There was no definite face, just an impression of eyes, gazing back at him. “It's long since I've been here,” said the spirit. That familiar, gentle voice. Gabriel thought of it as the Talking Light. “There are others who want to speak to you, where the spirits of the dead linger. The Hidden is their world.”
The dead wanted to speak to him? Gabriel's mouth went dry at the thought. Who? His grandmother? His brother? “I don't think...I'm ready to talk to them. Just tell me—do you have a name? Who are you? Are you one of the dead?”
“T have never been subject to death. As for a name, some in your world have called me Mikha 'el.”
Mikha 'el? “I'll call you...Mike. Light Mike.”
“All right. You cannot sustain this contact long.... It is too new to you. If you remain, your mind will melt into it, and you will lose all shape. So quickly: ask me what you want. “
His mind would melt? He would lose shape? He felt like running then. But this bright thing knew secrets. This was a chance to ask...
“What...what actually happened to my brother?” Gabriel blurted. “Sean was really little when he died but—is he there?”
“You will hear from him, in time. Someone else stands behind him, and he stands in that shadow. The wall of force is cracked and may fall completely, and when that day comes, we will see who is stronger. An enemy hides itself from you.... And now someone approaches, in dark ignorance, behind you. We are not alone here. “
“Oh, God—oh, what is he—what have they done to him!” A choked exclamation from behind.
And for the first time in his life, Gabriel Bleak saw himself from behind. He saw himself through” someone else's eyes: his father's eyes, dad at the door to the barn, seeing him framed by the doorway to the corral, surrounded by luminous fog...and floating in the air several feet over the floor, talking to something that wasn't there. And Gabriel saw that in his father's eyes, at that moment, his son was unnatural.
Gabriel shuddered, felt sick at the emotional repugnance he felt in his father's regard. The emotion broke his contact with the Hidden—and Light Mike vanished; the Hidden became hidden once more. The energy field disintegrated below him, and he dropped to the ground.
His father's point of view on him receded, and all Gabriel could see, then, was the barn around him, the ordinary world. He turned around to look at his dad, who'd put his boots on, sock-less and unlaced, to protect his feet so he could go and look for his son; his father, in overalls and T-shirt, a big man who never showed fear, backing away from his own child...backing away from his son and muttering the Lord's Prayer. His mother, he saw then, standing a few steps behind him, in her long, peach-colored nightgown.
She'd seen him too, talking to something invisible, and floating in the air.
They backed away and turned their backs, his father circling an arm around his mother, drawing her protectively with him; his mother softly protesting, the two of them hurrying back to the house. Away from their son.
Gabriel heard crickets, and the horses snorting. He turned to look out across the corral again. He saw bits of mown alfalfa blowing across the dirt of the corral, and star-lit clouds parading overhead, and no other motion, nothing else. Mike the Talking Light was gone; the slow-motion sea of energy— the field of the Hidden—was gone.
No. The Hidden itself was still there. When he did as he'd been taught, stretched out his sensations, he sensed the Hidden...but now it was muffled. Seen through several pairs of sunglasses. Felt through a damp, sweaty sheet. A few degrees separated.
Never again would he see it quite so nakedly. And rarely would he sense the presence of Mike Light.
But he knew...the light that spoke was still there, removed to some metaphysical distance, but not'' gone forever. And it was possible to disclose the Hidden, to delve into it and manipulate it...and someday he would do it again.
What else was left to him?
***
YEARS AGO, THAT WAS, Bleak thought, as the train ground to a halt at the station he wanted. But it felt like seconds ago. It ached that much. Glorious and painful, both.
Now, just a few hours after seeing a demon chew through someone's brains at a bar on the Hudson, Bleak was rushing out of the PATH train, hurrying across the platform toward the street-exit stairs, gazing at subway ad posters but not seeing them. Seeing only his father's horrified face, that night long ago.
He never quite got over the look on his father's face. Or what happened soon after. His father, refusing to discuss what he'd seen—muttering about diabolic influences, warnings from the Reverend Rowell at the Lutheran church—making the arrangements to send him away to military school. Telling Mom, “The boy's always been into the military, let him get a good close look at it and see if it's for him.”
And Gabriel hadn't been entirely sorry to go, though he hadn't been ready to leave home so soon. He'd known why his dad had sent him there, really. Because his father was afraid of his own son.
Something had seemed to block his attempts at contact with Light Mike, after that night. He was not able to ask the question, to get the answer that had been snatched away from him when his father had interrupted his first real exploration of the Hidden.
What did you say about my brother, Sean ? I don't understand. Tell me about my brother!
Coming out of the PATH train station, Bleak winced at the morning light, looking for a cab. Hard to find at this hour. Glancing at the sky, half expecting the feds' chopper to be up there. But the CCA helicopter was gone.
He wondered if he'd meet her again. Agent Sarikosca. Something about her...
***
THEY WERE ALL TIRED, dead tired, gathered around the car, Loraine and Zweig and Arnie and the other agents, on the helicopter pad, outside CCA headquarters in Long Island.
It was about seven thirty the same morning. They hadn't slept—always feeling close to their quarry. Never quite catching up till that moment, hovering over the broken-down old dock. Then they'd lost him again.
The chopper was cooling off behind them, its rotors lazily turning. Loraine Sarikosca and Dorrick in the chopper had found Bleak again—and others, it appeared—then lost him almost as quickly.
“I'm not sure what we can do legally, once we've got them,” Dorrick was saying.
“Theoretically we don't need evidence for an arrest,” she said, “long as we've got the Homeland Security stripe.” There were things Dorrick didn't get, yet. “But even CCA likes to know they've got the right guy. I saw what I saw, but—in our line of work sometimes people start to imagine things so administration's never sure till there's film and a lot of witnesses. And it's not like we can get the police to do a Code Three on him. We'd have to explain why we want him.”
“We could tell them he's a terrorist,” Zweig said, thumping the hood of the car with the flat of his hand.
“We're trying not to use that one,” Arnie pointed out. “Confuses the antiterrorist guys. Crosses 'em up and they get mad.”
“Pretty impressive, that thing he did at the end,” Dorrick muttered. “Back there in the alley. Walking on air. Can't do that with any ordnance we get issued. I kept looking for a wire.” He shook his head.
“There wasn't any wire.” Loraine remembered that mother and child out in Nevada...going straight up, in that blinding plume. Witnessing that was part of her CCA training, and she'd thought, then, I'm in over my head. But the paranormal had always fascinated her. She couldn't walk away.
“You could've been killed, taking him on alone, Loraine,” Arnie said, with more feeling than he probably intended to show. He was leaning against the car near her; took off his sunglasses, tapped them on his knee. She stood awkwardly by the car's open door.
Loraine was aware that Arnie was sweet on her. Nice-looking guy with one of those close-cut beards, sculpted four-o'clock shadow, big shoulders, big hands, quick smile. But she didn't have time for his crush—CCA was still defining itself, and she was still finding her footing in it.
“If you're sure of the ID, what do we have on him, Dorrick?” she asked. “God, I need some coffee. Let's get in the damn car.” She got in the backseat.
She'd been notified about Bleak only an hour before she'd met him. She'd been told that a CCA study subject had been located—they'd lost track of him in recent years—and she was to use one of the new detectors to track him, try to bring him in. Not much time to study his file.
“Most of what we got is right here.” Dorrick, getting in the driver's seat of the car, tapped the little computer display on the dashboard. Zweig climbed in beside him.
Loraine leaned forward, looking between the two men at the small screen tilted out from the display under the dashboard. The screen was scrolling military data. Lots of it. She saw recommended for a MoH, Silver Star.... She made an impatient gesture. “I want to see early history. We know he was a war hero.”
“The hell he was,” Zweig said. “He was using this damn power, gave him an edge.” “Doesn't protect you from bullets,” Loraine observed.
Dorrick scrolled to early history. “Says he grew up on a ranch in eastern Oregon. Horses...goats.” “Goats?” Arnie laughed, rubbing his eyes. “A goat ranch?”
“They raised alfalfa, had a small dairy, and he bred some kind of fancy goats, along with horses. The boy liked rock music and animals. He was in the goddamn FFA, can you believe that? Teenager, they sent him to a military boarding school. Two years of college, dropped out to enlist, Army Rangers. Made sarge. Left that and now he's a bounty hunter.”
“Hmph,” Loraine said, yawning. Stretching as well as she could in the confines of the car. She just wanted to get back to her condo in Brooklyn Heights, check on her cats, get some rest. “No documentation of his power early on, but apparently someone was monitoring the power and... expecting it. He could be going back home if he's tight with his parents...friends back there.”
“Says Bleak is mostly a loner,” Dorrick said, reading ahead. “Makes 'friends' with bartenders. Had girlfriends, only one that was long-term, she split. Played rhythm guitar with some rock band a “ while back, not an expert musician. Some kind of bad incident at a minor concert, exploding equipment, a fire, no one hurt but there was a small-claims lawsuit from the club—and the band split up. Bleak had a brother...who vanished when he was a kid. When he was a toddler, according to this.”
“Vanished?”
“What it says. There's nothing more about that...says material was redacted from the file.” “Really.” What had they censored? Loraine wondered about some of the prototype-CCA programs—she'd heard some stories about their blackest black ops. “He knows about the device,” Zweig pointed out.
Loraine shrugged. “They'd have found out soon enough anyway. The thing to do is to make more of them—we only have one that really works—and increase the range so that we can find them wherever they are. Dr. Helman says it can be done. We just need the budget.”
“Who decides CCA's budget these days?” Dorrick asked. “I asked when I came on, but everybody shrugged me off.”
Loraine rubbed at her tired eyes. “Couple of generals at the Pentagon got the purse strings— Erlich and Swanson. They're kind of dubious about the whole thing. We need better detectors.”
She wondered if “find them wherever they are” was what she really wanted to do about ShadowComm types. After that fatal containment incident in Arkansas, her loyalty to CCA started to waver.
Loraine suspected the agency knew she wasn't completely committed to the job. General Forsythe, who ran the CCA, knew her record at the DIA—knew why she'd quit. Knew she wasn't always knee-jerk about being a team player.
She wasn't sure why she'd let them talk her into coming into the CCA. She'd always had a fascination with the occult. But was that enough? She wondered why they'd given her an assignment, authority over a crew, with so little relevant background.
Forsythe had put her to work in the field-even when he didn't seem to trust her. And for reasons she didn't fully understand, she didn't trust General Forsythe.
“That's it for me today,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Am I getting a ride or do I take a cab all the damn way to Brooklyn Heights?”