Her kisses good-bye were just a reflex, his predictions of return superfluous — it did not matter. She knew he would return when he returned, whenever that would be.
He loved her. He knew that. She loved him. He knew that, too.
They did not argue anymore. She did not question his job or offer any protest. On those evenings when he happened to be home she made dinner and they spoke of the weather, and the news, and repainting the master bedroom or what she should plant in the garden.
When he was not home, she shopped, she met with her bridge club, she visited her deteriorating mother in the retirement village outside of Los Angeles, and she even went to an occasional movie by herself.
She kept the home spotless; that was her pet project keeping her busy and focused.
Clean, neatly tucked sheets covered the bed in the spare room, and paper flowers decorated the night stand there. Yet no one came to visit. The master bedroom was equally as clean and well kept, an easy task, considering that half the bed was empty half the nights.
The living room, with the television and the couch and the recliner, was immaculate, decorated with wedding photographs, a Thomas Kincaid print depicting a snow-covered village, and the latest version of whatever coffee-table book had caught her eye at the mall.
A nice house. Not gigantic, but roomy. Not sophisticated, but very well maintained. Not a whole lot of land, but a nice size yard with privacy fencing to keep the world out.
What a perfect little home. All it needed was someone to live in it. The Gants were merely ghosts walking the halls.
He leaned against the counter and watched. She wore a bandana to keep her long black hair from her eyes while working in the dirt. She wore jeans and a gray t-shirt and dug into the soil to eliminate the remains of a dead or dying plant or weed.
Thom wondered what would happen — how she would feel — if one of these missions were his last. If one time he told her he would be back in a week and he was not back in ten days, or two weeks, or a month.
He wondered how she would feel when the big American-made SUV with the government license plates and tinted windows pulled to the curb and two well-manicured military types in dress uniforms and carrying attaché cases came marching up the walkway.
Would she be afraid or relieved?
He knew Jean would not have given her heart to someone whom she could ever stop loving. He knew that she was a part of him and he was a part of her — as much a part of her as her right arm.
No, he thought. No. She was right-handed. Without her right arm she could not do her crossword puzzles or write a shopping list or sketch wildflowers on the patio. Instead, he was her left arm — a good left arm, but still just the left arm. If he were gone, she would miss him. But would her life change? At all?
Thom remembered that a dark blue Chevrolet Suburban with an MP at the wheel waited for him at the curb. He had never made them wait so long before. His departures were always quick, efficient, and well planned; just like everything else Archangel did.
Why was this time different?
Because he had forgotten his case. He had come back inside and she was not crying or pounding her fists in frustration or opening the porch door for a lover to slip in. Perhaps any of those alternatives would have been preferable to what he did find: Jean going about her business because today was just another day in her life like any other day.
Major Thom Gant carried his briefcase out the front door. Jean continued tugging at a weed until she managed to pull it free of the soil, root and all.
7
Gant wound his wristwatch three hours into the future to make up the difference between California and Pennsylvania. In all, six hours had passed since he had left his home, yet he found himself in another Suburban, this one black and with a different soldier — a Corporal Sanchez — at the wheel who, like Thom, dressed in casual civilian clothes.
His day had begun with leaving Jean to her garden, then a ride on a DOD Learjet to a small commercial airport in Williamsport, Pennsylvania where Sanchez came to collect him. Next came a maze of rural roads until they finally settled on Route 118 East. Thirty minutes later they came to a crossroads at a village named Red Rock. At that point Sanchez swung onto another road slinking north through Ricketts Glen State Park and climbed Red Rock mountain.
Along the way they passed a trailer park, forests thinned by either logging or fire, and a sign marking an elevation of over 2,400 feet.
Eventually Sanchez abandoned this road for an even smaller one. Not long after that turn, Thom saw those first ominous yellow signs: "Posted and Patrolled," followed shortly thereafter by, "Property of the United States Federal Government — Armed Patrols." Then, of course, came the hurricane fencing with signs reading, "High Security Area — Sentries Authorized to Use Lethal Force."
Places like this, Thom thought, always had those signs. They always had the signs, the fences, the security cameras, the dogs, the infrared sensors, the checkpoints, and the key card locks — all to keep the outsiders out. Funny how the trouble that inevitably came to places like the Red Rock Mountain Research Facility came from within.
How many times had he heard this story? From White Sands to Bikini Atoll to Groom Lake, Major Thom Gant had visited many top-secret, hush-hush, need-to-know-access-restricted compounds. Each one with those fences and guard dogs; each one with legions of PhDs, high-tech laboratories, redundant containment systems, and tightly constructed emergency protocols.
And the head honcho scientist always said the same thing: "We took every foreseeable precaution," or, "no one could have anticipated this type of chain reaction," or even, "we never saw a retrogression such as this in the simulations."
Yet there they were, Mr. Clean Up and his team, ready to bail out the scientists who climbed that mountain because it was there, whether that mountain be insects genetically engineered for pest control that just happened to develop a taste for human flesh or a new biological weapon that—whoops—got loose down there in Sector C and turned the technicians rabid.
This is all very embarrassing, but would you and your men mind going down there and shooting them all dead?
Oh, Gant did not know his orders yet and he did not know what the Red Rock Mountain Research Facility was all about, but one thing was for certain: they did not call him all the way to the boondocks of Pennsylvania for target practice. At least the situation was not an emergency; the rest of the Archangel unit would not arrive for another twenty-four hours.
His ride moved into the compound proper. The grounds were shaded by trees, most of which had exploded into brilliant autumn colors. Red, orange, and yellow foliage decorated the scene. Piles of leaves congregated under trees and fence posts; wind gusts carried handfuls through the air.
In the distance, rising above the kaleidoscope of colors, was an old radar dome atop a concrete roof, the only part of the research facility visible from any sort of distance, sort of like a dorsal fin warning of a lurking shark.
A guard station marked the main gate. The soldiers there eschewed military BDUs for rent-a-cop costumes. Two hundred yards further in stood parallel rows of small, identical cabins arranged in orderly lines like a regiment of marines assembling. They reminded Gant of the cabins he had stayed in at camp as a kid. That thought caused a few beads of sweat to pop up on his neck in memory of the brutal heat of Georgia summers long past.