He searched the facility and shot two maintenance workers crouching behind boxes in a storage room. He found a female scientist hiding beneath a bunk and shot her, also.

Throughout, he was conscious of the terrible hum. He returned to the research area, satisfied himself that the first guard was finally dead, and put on the earphones.

His headache vanished as the music drifted and floated.

38

Beneath the airbase, Raleigh unlocked a metal door and stepped into a room that he hadn’t visited for three years. The smell of dankness and must hung in the air. He saw tiny red and white lights that might have been the eyes of animals, but when he flicked a switch on the wall, overhead lamps revealed that they belonged to a vast array of electronic instruments stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves. Needles pulsed, and dials glowed. As he examined them closely, he saw that they registered an unusually high level of activity.

Perfect, he thought.

When he had personally supervised the installation of this array, the equipment had been state-of-the-art. Since then, major advances had made it necessary to supplement all the instruments with serious updates that his team had brought. Even so, the existing equipment was doing its job, amplifying energy from the source and transmit- ting it through the dish concealed in the wreckage of the hangar above him. That camouflaged dish was synchronized with the horizontal dish at the observatory.

Tomorrow night the signal would be amplified even more and beamed through a vertical dish that pointed toward a satellite.

In previous experiments, the links had failed, sometimes with disastrous results. But given the improved electronics that his team was installing, and the unusually powerful energy the source was giving off, Raleigh believed that this time he would finally be able to complete a journey that he’d begun as a boy inspired by his grandfather.

He pressed a button and activated a row of surveillance monitors. In night-vision green, they showed the ruined hangars as well as the area around the airbase. The superior lenses on the hidden cameras allowed him to magnify images impressively. He watched the dog handler and the German shepherd patrolling the fence.

He switched his attention to the viewing area down the road, where the crowd was out of control, charging toward the fence. He hadn’t counted on having human test subjects. The fact that there were hundreds of them provided an even greater benefit.

But what really mattered, he knew, were the test subjects he’d brought with him. The reaction of the men on his team would deter- mine whether or not the project could be reliably continued. They didn’t know that by setting up the experiment, they were crucial parts of it.

39

A shoe struck Brent’s forehead. For a moment, his vision turned gray.

“Keep the cameras rolling!” he shouted into his lapel mike as people trampled over him. He worried that the director in the station’s control room would stop the broadcast if he thought that Brent was being seriously injured on camera, so he did his best to sound in control.

From Brent’s perspective on the gravel, everything was a blur of pant legs and dresses. The truth was, he felt smothered. Another shoe struck him, this time on the side of his neck. He wheezed and rolled, trying to get away from the mob. The gravel tore at him. His shoulder banged against the underside of the motor home. Desperate, he squirmed beneath the vehicle as far as he could manage. From this vantage point, he saw shoes, boots, and pant legs rushing past. The side of his neck throbbed.

Any closer to my throat and I might have been killed, he thought. Suddenly the crowd was gone, and he crawled from under the truck.

“I’m okay! I’m okay!” he shouted into the microphone.

God, I hope the helicopter’s getting a shot of this, he thought. The left sleeve of his suit coat was torn open. Blood trickled from his forehead.

Hearing shouts and screams from the crowd, he was about to climb to the top of the motor home and continue broadcasting, but abruptly he saw Anita and Luther Hamilton lying on the gravel. The camera was on its side, its red light still on.

He ran to Anita and heard her groan. “Are you okay? Can you stand?” he asked urgently. “I need to get you away from this crowd!”

He put one of her arms around his neck and raised her. She wavered.

“Come on, I’ll take you where it’s safe.”

The producer and his crew scrambled from the truck. Brent gave Anita to them and hurried over to Luther Hamilton, who coughed and struggled to crawl. Brent helped him stand and guided him to- ward the back of the truck.

“We need an ambulance!”

“That’s for sure.” The producer pointed.

Brent turned and gaped at a half-dozen people lying on the gravel.

At the back of the parking lot, people charged against each other, pushing toward the darkness beyond the fence.

“I see them!”

“They’re beautiful!”

“Out of my way!”

“Can’t breathe!”

Brent picked up Anita’s camera and gave it to the producer. “Do you remember how to use one of these?”

“You bet. I even keep paying my union dues.”

“Then follow me to the top of the Winnebago.”

Brent grabbed the toppled ladder and propped it against the truck. The tremor in his right hand alarmed him. Feeling faint, he struggled up. At the top, he noted that the station’s helicopter had activated its landing lights, illuminating the crowd.

Hoarse from the blow to the side of his throat, he spoke into his lapel mike, describing what he saw. “The people at the back are forcing everyone ahead. Those in the middle are being crushed. The ones in front are being squeezed against the barbed-wire fence.”

Brent heard wood cracking.

“I think the fence is about to…”

Several posts snapped. The fence collapsed. The people in front dropped with it, screaming as they fell onto the barbed wire. The rest of the crowd surged over their backs, charging into the field.

In the distance, the lights continued to shimmer.

“I hear a sound,” Brent said into his microphone. “Luther Hamilton mentioned that sometimes a sound accompanies the lights. I wonder if that’s happening now. No, I’m wrong. The sound has nothing to do with the lights. It’s-”

40

Standing next to a car at the side of the dark road, Page gaped toward the observation area, where the crowd was out of control. If he’d been alone, he’d have run to help the police, although he couldn’t imagine how even ten times as many officers would be able to handle what he was witnessing.

Right now, Tori was all he cared about.

“You were right to stay away from the crowd,” he said.

He turned.

She wasn’t next to him.

He frowned toward the shadowy road, then stepped toward the space between the parked cars, but he still didn’t see her.

“Tori?”

He hurried back to her Saturn. She wasn’t inside. He studied the darkness on the far side of the row of parked cars. No sign of her.

“Tori!”

Page doubted that she’d have gone toward the crowd, which had become a single mass that was trampling over the barbed-wire fence, crushing people, and disappearing into the night.

But if she hadn’t gone in that direction, there was only one other possibility.

Thunder rumbled.

Page swung toward the murky grassland and ran toward it. Tori had been right when she’d guessed that the observation area was an arbitrary spot from which to try to see the lights. They could be detected from other points along the road, and tonight, to his surprise, he’d had no trouble spotting them. When Tori had pointed excitedly toward the dark horizon, he’d seen them immediately.