His voice was strong. “I told you not to fly into that area.”

“That’s news to me,” Page said. Next to him, the ambulance attendants put an oxygen mask over the woman’s face and attached an IV line. “You said the government gave me clearance to ignore the restriction.”

“And then they revoked it. I warned you to get out of there.”

“If you told us to leave, we didn’t hear it,” Tori said. “The police radio stopped working.”

Loft stepped forward, balancing the television camera on his shoulder, focusing it on Medrano.

“Captain, I’m Brent Loft from First-on-the-Scene News in El Paso. This couple did an amazing thing. At great risk to their lives, they landed their aircraft on hazardous terrain at the observatory so they could stop a guard from killing us. In fact, as you can see, he’d al- ready shot my partner. They loaded us on their plane and took off. The entire time, I was afraid the maniac would fire another grenade at us.”

Medrano was taken by surprise. “Grenade?”

“He’d already used one to shoot down a helicopter. Then he fired one at our van.”

“Why was he firing grenades?”

“I have no idea, any more than I know why he piled all those corpses onto the back of a truck.”

“Corpses… in a truck?”

“A lot of them. Enough to fill it. He kept babbling about wanting to listen to music.” Loft continued aiming the camera. “Something bad is going on over there, Captain. You need to get your men to that observatory before God knows what else happens.”

Medrano opened his mouth to say something, then decided against it. He hurried to his cruiser, where he reached for the micro- phone on his police radio and spoke urgently into it.

Loft lowered the camera and aimed it toward the ambulance attendants as they lifted the woman onto the gurney.

“How’s she doing?” Page asked.

“Lost plenty of blood,” an attendant answered.

“She’d have lost more if it weren’t for the guy with the camera.”

“I’ll use that quote when I edit this,” Loft said.

He stepped quickly over to the ambulance and began talking to the attendants at the open doors. He used his free hand to gesture persuasively. The next thing, he climbed into the back.

Page shook his head. “I hate to say this, but I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of him on television.”

Siren blaring, the ambulance rushed away.

The man in the frayed coveralls came over to them. “I’ll help you push your plane to a tie-down spot.”

“Actually, we’re going up again,” Page told him.

The man frowned toward the dimming sky. “Never liked flying at night.”

“We still have something to settle. Am I right, Tori? Or maybe you don’t feel the need any longer.”

“More than ever,” Tori said. “Let’s finish this.”

62

The hum had become so intense that it felt like a drill boring into Halloway’s skull.

Soon, he thought. Soon I won’t hear it any longer. Soon the only thing I’ll hear will be the music.

But despite his determination, he needed all of his willpower not to be distracted while he finished rigging the booby trap. The design-learned in Iraq-consisted of two trip wires. The first was stretched across the upper part of the stairs. If an assault team some- how managed to force the door open up there, they’d respond to their training and check for traps. After they spotted the wire and the grenades it was attached to, they’d disengage it, then proceed down the stairs. The second wire-in shadows, stretched across a lower part of the stairs-was the killer.

As he worked, the hum made Halloway’s hands want to shake, but he refused to let that happen. Grinding his teeth, he tied the wire to a cluster of concealed grenades. Satisfied that the work had been done correctly, he carefully descended the remainder of the stairs.

At the bottom, he increased speed along the hallway and entered the surveillance room, where he saw that even more screens had gone blank. One of the few that was working showed the man who’d shot at him as he raised his M4 and fired.

Another screen went dead.

Well, that’s okay, Halloway thought. I wasn’t going to be watching the monitors anyhow.

He picked up his reloaded M4 and went down the hallway to the door marked DATA ANALYSIS. Inside, he’d already placed five other M4s on a table, along with numerous hundred-round magazines and a small stack of grenades. If an assault team tried to stop him from listening to the music, he planned to show them just how furious that would make him.

The room still smelled of death, mostly because of the dried blood that covered the floor. But Halloway didn’t have time to clean it. Any- way, when the music started, the scent of cinnamon would replace the stench of the blood. Because he didn’t know how to manipulate the electronic instruments, he’d kept all of them on, their panels glowing continuously.

The only switch he felt confident using was the one that activated either the speakers or the headphones, and the only knob he knew how to control was for the volume. While he’d prepared the booby trap, he’d kept the sound coming from the speakers. It had been loud enough that he could hear the static from a distance. More important, he’d been able to hear growing hints of music emerging from the static. Those half-heard alluring echoes were what had made him capable of working despite the agony of his headache.

Now the music was more than just hints and echoes. Strengthening, it drifted and floated. Halloway felt its eerie tones lifting him. The pain of the drill boring into his brain mercifully receded. The hum diminished, overcome by the sensual melody that again brought the taste of orange juice and vodka.

He closed his eyes. The woman he danced with whispered into each of his ears. Kissed them. Drew her tongue along them.

It left his ears wet. He put his hands to them and opened his eyes long enough to see what was on them.

Blood was dripping from his ears.

63

Raleigh finished yet another phone call in a successful effort to keep law enforcement away from the observatory. The voices in the urgent conversation had sounded distant because he couldn’t take the risk of removing his earplugs now that it was almost dark outside and the static on the audio monitors was beginning to resolve itself into music.

The words “national security” were a powerful invocation. With the cooperation of the FBI, Raleigh had again stopped the Highway Patrol from entering the restricted area. He’d arranged for equipment to be delivered that would allow an assault team to break into the observatory. After they eliminated the guard and cleaned the facility so that outside agencies couldn’t question its true purpose, Raleigh would make sure the bastard’s autopsy revealed a high blood level of crack cocaine, explaining his psychotic behavior.

With one crisis dealt with, but anticipating more, he set down the phone, stepped from the command center, and surveyed the eight men poised in front of the numerous electronic consoles. Their faces reflecting the glow of instruments, they turned dials, refining and adjusting the incoming signals. In response to his orders, they’d turned off the audio capability of their monitors. Their earplugs were firmly in place.

Raleigh thought about his great-grandfather, who in 1919 had flown toward the lights and never been seen again. His great- grandmother had taken her two-year-old son and moved to Boston, but despite the distance that she’d put between herself and the lights, she hadn’t been able to keep them out of her thoughts. Her memories of the lights and her husband became the bedtime stories she told her son, who grew up dreaming about them. When he was twenty and skin cancer finally killed his mother, he hitchhiked all the way to Texas. He needed to hitchhike because the Great Depression continued to ravage the nation. Using his legs and his thumb was the only way he could afford to make the trip. His name was Edward. His mother’s story about his father’s disappearance had so obsessed him from when he was a child that he was drawn to Rostov the way religious people are drawn to holy places. It took him three months to get there. When he finally arrived, his belt was cinched so tightly that it barely kept his pants up. His shoes had holes in them. His shirt was tattered. His face was browned by the sun.