It was the next day. Jamison was driving, and Decker was staring out the window at yet another approaching storm.
“Dollar for your thoughts,” said Jamison.
“Not sure they’re worth that much.”
“You seem down. I mean I can understand that, what with our line of work. But you always seem to be able to, I don’t know, rise above it.”
He turned to look at her. “Stan has been my brother-in-law for over two decades. I’ve spoken to him more here than I have in the last twenty years. Same with my sisters.”
“Well, they lived a long way away. And siblings grow up and move on with their own lives.”
“You have siblings. You keep in touch with them all.”
“I’m the oldest. It sort of comes with the territory. And not to stereotype, but girls are a little better at that than guys. At least in my experience.”
“Before what happened to me happened, Ididkeep in touch. I would call and even write letters, if you can believe that. Before Stan and Renee moved to California, I went to visit them in Colorado. I was still in college. They were pretty much still newlyweds. I helped Stan lay a brick patio in their backyard.”
“That’s really nice, Decker.”
“I wasn’t drafted after my senior year. I was a walk-on with the Browns, worked my tail off and made the team, really just as a special teams player. I was a good athlete. I was big enough and strong enough. But the NFL is a whole other level, the best of the best. I didn’t have the speed or the other intangibles you needed to really be more than a journeyman. Then I was running down the field after the kickoff on opening day. And the next thing I woke up in a hospital. Both my sisters were there. I’d been in a coma for days. Renee was holding one of my hands and Diane the other. I didn’t even notice them at first. I was looking at the weird colors on the monitor and the clock. And I thought I was losing my mind. Then I saw my sisters, and even though I knew they were my sisters, there was just something . . . gone. I felt nothing for them. I mean nothing.”
He looked away.
Jamison, who had clearly been stunned by this candid out-pouring from her partner, finally found her voice. “You’d been through a terrible trauma, Decker. And then you had some unexpected . . . challenges.”
“A nice, polite way to describe it.”
“But you’ve changed. Since the first time I met you in that courthouse back in Burlington. You’re different.”
“I know. And that’s what scares the hell out of me.”
He said nothing more, but just stared at the darkening skies like they would any minute starkly reveal his even darker future.
WHEN THEY DROVE UPto the front gate of the facility two men in suits approached them.
Jamison rolled down her window and showed her creds.
“Go right in,” said one of the men. “You’ve been cleared through.”
The gate opened and Jamison drove on.
“Robie’s doing?” she said.
“When I called Robie and filled him in on what we had discovered, he said he was going to get the wheels turning for our visit here. And they were going to start making discreet inquiries about the chemical weapons piece.”
They parked where they had last time and got out.
Jamison said, “So where do we begin?”
“Let’s try the pyramid building first. Probably the closest I’ll ever get to Egypt.”
Another man stationed there and also wearing a suit, his eyes shielded by sunglasses though now the dark clouds fully covered the sky, let them inside.
They could see that the stone walls on the outside also constituted the interior walls.
The inside was enormous. In the center of the facility was, at least Decker assumed, the PARCS radar apparatus that Sumter had told them about. It looked somewhat like the enormous telescopes one would see in an observatory but with lots of other equipment surrounding it, including workstations lining the walls, with banks of darkened computers on them.
“Wow,” said Jamison. “This looks like something you’d see in a weird science fiction film where they’re plotting how to blow up the world.”