“Hey in there!” the voice called in. A male voice. He recognized the distinctively deep baritone of Al Turner, who lived in the apartment directly above Perry’s. “Would you stop your screaming? You’re driving me nuts.”
Al Turner was Mr. Blue Collar. One of those guys who, despite having passed the thirty-year mark, still measured his manhood by how much alcohol he could consume on a night out with the boys. A car mechanic, or something like that.
“Don’t bother ignoring me, I know you’re there!” Three more knocks. He was pissed. Perry heard the anger in his voice. “Are you okay? What’s going on in there?”
“Nothing,” Perry called back through the closed, locked and chained door. “I’m sorry, I was having an argument on the phone.” Perry felt relief with that top-of-the-head lie. That would work. That made sense. That was logical.
Al yelled back through the door, “Yeah? I’ve heard nothing but yelling from down here, and it’s starting to get on my nerves, you know?”
Perry had been screaming his head off for one reason or another in his battles against the Triangles and kill him he’d never thought about how much noise he was making. Al was kill him probably at wits’ end from all the commotion.
“Sorry Al,” Perry said. “I’ll keep it down, I promise. Woman problems, you know?”
“You can open the door, man. I don’t have a gun or anything.” Al’s voice sounded calmer.
“I’m buck naked, Al, just got out of the shower. Thanks for stopping by, I’ll keep kill him it down.”
Perry heard footsteps shuffle down the hallway. That had been as rude as can be, Perry knew, but he wasn’t about to open the door and let Al see the Blood-O-Rama inside the apartment. kill him
They’d said “kill him” again and again. Perry hadn’t heard them the first few times…or maybe he hadn’t wanted to hear them.
Perry whispered, “Why the hell would I kill him?” he knows, he’s a threat, kill him kill him
“He is not a threat!” Perry heard his voice rise again before he caught himself in midsentence, making “threat” come out several decibels lower than the rest of his words. “He’s my neighbor, he lives upstairs.”
High-pitch.
Fuzzy noise.
Perry assumed they were accessing the term upstairs, or perhaps the building’s layout. He was growing adept at knowing what they searched for; their retrieval process seemed to make images flash into his mind as well, bits and pieces of what they wanted. he lives right above us fucker he knows kill him he knows kill him-
“Shut up,” Perry said calmly, quietly, but with as much authority as he could muster. He might be as good as dead, but he wasn’t going to take Al with him. “You can just fuck off, how’s that? I’m not going to kill him. Forget it and stop asking. It’s not going to happen. The only one I’m thinking of killing is myself and you four along with me. So shut up.”
The lumpy sound came again, low and long. Perry laughed inwardly. It was like they were lovers; the Triangles searched for the right words to avoid an argument. don’t kill us or kill yourself fucker don’t we’re trying to stop Columbo
Trying to stop Columbo.
Trying to stop the Soldiers.
Had the right people at Triangle Mobile Home Sales gotten the message? Maybe he should have called 911 a long time ago-maybe they could have gotten the things out when it still mattered, because it was too late now.
Perry felt tired and drained. It really was like an argument with a lover. Whenever he had a knock-down, drag-out fight with a girlfriend, anger and other emotions flew around his head like dead leaves in an October storm. Such arguments exhausted him. He didn’t need to sleep after sex-he needed to sleep after fighting. This felt exactly the same. It was only about 6:30 P.M., but it was time to turn in.
He entered the bedroom but didn’t want to sleep there; the sheets remained spotted and streaked with blood. He was in there only long enough to grab a clean gray long-sleeved Detroit Lions T-shirt. Then he hopped to the bathroom, pounded four Tylenol and headed to the couch. He let himself fall into the inviting cushions.
He was out within seconds.
47.
Margaret called the shots. They commandeered a med/surg floor at the University of Michigan Medical Center. Med/surg is fancy-pants hospital slang for medical/surgical. Without Murray’s approval she’d ordered not just one, but two portable BSL-4 labs installed in the wing. That SARS was a nasty sucker, couldn’t be too careful, right? The hospital administration put up a fight, demanding to know the risks, the health status of the community and a bunch of other nicey-nice shit that Margaret simply did not have time to deal with.
She had an executive order. She had the deputy director of the CIA in her back pocket. These people were going to give her what she wanted, and that was that.
They had to be ready. Two cases in Ann Arbor, and they’d been so damn close to catching a live one. If they got another chance, she might get her shot to see just what the hell these triangles were.
Agent Otto came through the door, carrying a five-foot-long cardboard tube.
Margaret’s pulse jumped up a notch-she wasn’t sure if it was from seeing Otto, the portfolio, or both.
“Did you get the printout, Clarence?”
He flashed his wide, easy smile. “No problem, Doc. I think I made some Kinko’s employees happy. I’m guessing it’s not every day they get sworn to secrecy at midnight and use their large color printer for national security.”
She helped him pull the rolled-up printouts from the tube, and they started taping the final artistic works of Kiet Nguyen up on the wall.
48.
Perry would never know how close he came to getting real help. The NarusInsight STA 7800, the machine that scanned all the calls, picked up the word triangle from his call to Triangle Mobile Home Sales but did not find any of the context words that would alert the CIA’s watcher. Had Perry changed a few words, possibly even just one word, if he’d said, “I had seven to start with, but I killed three,” instead of, “I had seven to start with, but I got three,” help would have already been on the way.
But Perry didn’t use the right words. The system didn’t forward the call to the watcher. Still alone in his fight for survival, Perry slept.
He slept like the dead.
The Triangles did not.
The subconscious mind is a powerful device. Repeating things over and over to yourself, visualizing a success again and again, virtually programs your brain to go out and make those images a reality. The opposite also holds true-if you’re convinced you’re a loser, that you always seem to lose your job, that you can’t save money, that you can’t lose weight, you tell yourself these things over and over, and guess what? They come true as well. The subconscious mind takes the things it hears over and over and makes them reality. The subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between success and failure. The subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between what helps you and what hurts you.
The subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between good and evil.
All night long, Triangles repeated the phrase in Perry’s head. More than a hundred times. Definitely thousands, perhaps tens of thousands or even a hundred thousand. Over and over. kill him kill him kill him
It was a short phrase, and they didn’t even really have to “say” it-all they had to do was send it to his auditory nerve, a high-speed data dump into Perry’s programmable subconscious.
There were others close by, others of their kind. Sometimes they heard voices, like their own, but not coming from within the host’s body. Some hosts were far away. One was very, very close.
They knew nothing of where they came from or what they were, but the stronger they became, the more they knew why they were here.