Fuller studied her for several seconds and threw a worried glance at his colleague. There was something about this other man that made Erin think he was more dangerous even than Steve Fuller, although she couldn’t put her finger on what that was. Another gut instinct.

“First of all,” said Fuller with a sigh. “We didn’t kill anyone in Yuma. We used nonlethal gas. And second of all, Kyle Hansen is alive and well. Just like you. He’s sleeping peacefully in the next room.”

“Bullshit. You know I’ve studied psychopaths like you for years. You know I’ve spent every day in the company of the world’s smoothest liars. I’m not impressed with your apparent sincerity. You’ll have to do better than that.”

Fuller sighed and rose from the chair. “Follow me and I’ll show you.”

Fuller led her from the room and down a hallway. Guards were stationed outside the door, but he gave them a stand-down signal with his eyes. He opened the door to another room, also with two guards outside.

Erin entered and then gasped. Sure enough, Kyle Hansen was sprawled out on a portable cot, his chest rising and falling steadily.

She rushed forward and examined him, bringing her cuffed hands to his face and stroking his cheek. He felt warm and looked to be uninjured.

“Believe me when I tell you,” came Fuller’s voice from behind her, “that you and Kyle are the last two people I would want harmed.”

Erin turned to face him. “Where are we?” she said.

“We’re in Palm Springs. At a very secure facility under the desert. The one I had hoped to meet you in when I called you.” He shook his head. “If only I hadn’t so grossly underestimated you, we could have all spared ourselves a lot of trouble. But I still say it was impossible to predict you’d be this gutsy and elusive.”

He stared at her grimly. “But much, or maybe even all, of what you think you know is wrong. And it’s more critical than you know that you learn the truth.” He motioned toward the door. “So if we could return to where we were, we have a lot of ground to cover. And the faster we can finish, the faster we can return Kyle Hansen to consciousness.”

43

THEY HAD RETURNED to the room Erin had been in when she had first come to, across from Steve Fuller and the strange man who had yet to be introduced. Fuller had freed her of her restraints, making sure she understood they were being watched through video monitors and she had no chance of escaping.

Erin’s head was spinning. Was there really even more to this story than she knew? Somehow, she felt there must be, or she and Hansen wouldn’t be alive. But what could it possibly be?

“So can I assume it was Kyle who told you I was an arms dealer?” said Fuller.

Erin nodded. She had considered remaining silent, not answering his questions, but decided to cooperate—to a point. As long as she was only telling him things that were fairly obvious.

Fuller leaned in and stared at her intently. “Did Kyle happen to mention anything wild? You know, maybe something having to do visitors from another planet?”

“Funny you should mention that. In fact, he did. Pretty crazy, huh?”

The man beside Fuller began to unbutton his shirt, although his fingers seemed clumsy. “Not as crazy as you might think,” said the man, as twelve whiplike tentacles shot out from his stomach area and undid the last few buttons on the shirt with inhuman speed and elegance.

Erin’s mouth dropped open and she didn’t speak for several seconds. No wonder she had felt so uneasy around this man. Hansen had warned her this would be the case. Finally, with her eyes wider than she guessed they could open, she croaked, “Drake?”

The man—or clearly, the alien—shook his head. “No. My name is Fermi.”

“I don’t understand. I thought there was only one of you. Did the Wraps mount another Mount Everest expedition to send you after Drake?”

Steve Fuller turned to Fermi and raised his eyebrows. “She knows to call you a Wrap,” he said. “And that it took a heroic effort by your people to get you here. Kyle seems to have told her quite a lot.”

The alien frowned. “Erin, did Kyle just fail to mention any Wraps other than Drake, and you just assumed there was only one here? Or did he explicitly say that Drake was the only one?”

“Explicitly,” said Erin, and even this word was hard to spit out. Why hadn’t Kyle Hansen told her there were other aliens? Was there no one she could trust?

But suddenly she realized she was jumping to conclusions. “Drake must not have told Kyle about these others,” she said. “That would explain it.”

Fermi shook his head. “Erin, Steve and I met Kyle in a room very much like this one years ago. There are four Wraps on your planet. And Kyle knew that for certain.”

Erin shrank back as though she had been slapped, the color draining from her face.

“Look, Miss Palmer,” said Fuller. “Erin. I know you’ve been through a lot and don’t know who to trust. But I think you would agree, clinging to a blind trust of events as told by Kyle Hansen would be a mistake. He told you only one Wrap was here. And clearly this isn’t true. So if you could tell us what he told you, exactly, this would help us set the record straight.”

Erin nodded, like a zombie. Why not? What harm could it do at this point?

She launched into everything Hansen had told her. A galactic community he called the Seventeen. Sixteen interstellar arks parked in each of seventeen different solar systems. Hansen’s work with Drake, and the alien’s insistence that ridding the species of psychopathy was the only way to prevent humanity’s self-destruction. And Hansen’s claim that Steve Fuller was an arms dealer, and his rationale for why such a man would want to eliminate Drake.

Fuller and his alien associate listened intently, raising eyebrows, shaking their heads, and glancing at each other knowingly on occasion, but saying very little.

When she had finished they informed her that everything Hansen had told her about the Wraps, the Seventeen, and how transit to Earth had been accomplished was accurate, as far as Hansen knew it, but his narrative veered off course when it came to the Wraps’ expedition to Earth. There had been four Wraps, not one. And they had not gone it largely alone after arrival, as Hansen had described, but had immediately made contact with the government of the United States, since it was the strongest nation militarily.

Fuller and Fermi repeated almost all of what they had told Kyle Hansen those many years earlier about how the organization was set up, with Steve Fuller in charge, and the purpose and extent of their activities. They explained how and why they had abducted Hansen from his apartment near Carnegie Mellon, and the promise the Wraps had seen in him with respect to extending the frontiers of quantum mechanics and computing on Earth.

When they were finished, they waited silently while Erin pondered all that they had said. So many conflicting thoughts and emotions were wrestling for prominence she thought her head might explode.

“So why would Kyle mislead me?” she asked Fuller. “And why would he say you were an arms dealer? And Drake is real. Unless you’re telling me he really wasn’t the man—the being—I was working with to cure psychopathy. Which I’m not sure I’m willing to believe at this point. Kyle has said that only a Wrap—with a quantum computer—could have found the cure, and I believe it. So were you part of this also? Of curing psychopathy?”

Fuller took a deep breath. “I’ll answer all of these questions, and more. But let me come about it in a more roundabout way. Let us first tell you some things we never shared with Kyle. This will put all of the rest into context. It’s the only way you’ll understand.”

Erin waved her right hand toward the two men across from her in a classic, you’ve-got-the-stage gesture.