At first, Orlando figured he must be wearing some sort of metallic hat. It seemed to be gleaming bright in the sun. His head was a flashing sequence of lights and brilliance — mirroring the smaller flashes coming from lower.
His hands? What the hell?
Back to the other camera — now picking up the full image of the figure as he moved into the path of its sight.
A car drove by, obscuring the pair for a moment. Phoebe was still talking, lips moving and hand gesturing as she always did (unable to talk with her hands tied, as Orlando always joked).
And then the car passed and now the other man was revealed in silhouette — army jacket, dark sweat pants and shoes, but everywhere else where there was skin was just a brilliant glowing patchwork of lights, mostly gold, but flickering with bits of indigo, jade and ruby, an eye made of topaz.
Could Phoebe see this?
Somehow he thought/knew she didn’t. She saw something else, she saw something normal, mundane, forgettable even.
Orlando knew it, even as he knew that what she saw — the man was likely bald…
On the satellite feed, text scrolled down the side in bright red, flashing a warning as the screen flickered. Orlando sensed that alerts were suddenly ripping through cyberspace now, the security hubs lighting up, warnings issued all over, to countless agents and agencies.
Alerts triggered not because of Phoebe, but the other… Programmed to search for him, or his kind?
Satellites and cameras had been trained to pick up on just such an individual, someone who rarely if ever, emerged from the caves or tunnels or upper mountain ranges, preferring to hide and watch from a far, under cover of isolation and seclusion.
The text repeated one term over and over in its alarm.
Oh god what have I done?
And…
Phoebe, what have you done? Get out of there!
Even as Orlando thought this, he grafted onto that warning term — and realized it was much more than just an alarm.
It was a reference.
The code underlying the text referred to a subroutine access point.
Another file of deep, deep secrecy, shielded by layers of security clearance and coding he had noticed before in other areas, and bypassed it rather than try to hack something above his pay grade.
But now he knew he had no other choice. This was way too important. And it staggered his mind. If the NSA/CIA, whoever — knew about these guys, what did that mean?
They more than know about them, Orlando realized, tracking the coded signature back, zipping through the cyber landscape to an address clouded with misdirection and buried under mountains of irrelevant code and useless files of junk upon junk.
Can’t hide from me, Orlando whispered. Got your scent now, and since my wife’s in the middle of this, you bet your ass I’m coming for you.
He was going to learn the truth once and for all. How far down the rabbit hole this all went, and what kind of Wonderland shit was happening here.
In moments, he peeled away layers and layers of black and brown, like bark of a tree, torn free and tossed aside, and soon stood in front of the gleaming gold doorway to a data file wrapped in chains.
The address label, one that gave him chills at the same time as the feeling like he was on the precipice of ultimate understanding, was the same as on the warnings he had just seen flashing:
THE CUSTODIAN PROGRAM
18
Its very name was synonymous with conspiracy. Caleb recalled it all, every wild rumor and speculation, every incredible witness or ex-employee story, every candid interview by those who claimed they were experimented on at some underground facility there under Camp Hero, and left with incredible stories about everything from mind control to time travel, from teleportation to alternate dimensions. Montauk Point was linked to the Philadelphia Experiment, and some claimed that research into temporal wormholes had succeeded and this was a nexus to other times, other destinations even — such as Pine Gap and Area 51. Residents nearby had complained of kangaroos loose in the area years ago — a story Caleb delighted in hearing as his father had glossed over some of Montauk’s history.
“You know more than everything there is to know, I’m sure,” Boris said, rapping his knuckles against Caleb’s forehead. “All saved up here in your photographic-memory noggin. Every word from dear old dad, mixed in with your dutiful research long after he had passed on.”
“It all makes sense now.” Caleb stared out the window at the breaking waves, at the lighthouse shadow, feeling the urge to rush up there and take in the view, with his physical eyes as well as the psychic vision begging to be let out. He obliged, and here came the onslaught of visions: pure, unaltered flashes of things that may or may not have come from the stuff of his nightmares, his most outré research. He wasn’t entirely sure, maybe they came from Boris’s mind, but this time Caleb just picked up on the elements, glimpsing the horrors as they rolled past like a multi-colored freight train carrying top secret cargo.
Scenes on the movie set in his mind scrolled past in a storyboard covering various eras, the actors in costumes ranging from US military fatigues to Nazi SS gear, from lab coats to civilian work garb. Special effects predominated, from a giant bell-shaped contraption spinning like a centrifuge and spitting out whirling electrical energy, to doorway-shaped tears in reality. Scenes of faraway times and places, impossible scenery and architecture, even more impossible locations: storm-riddled mountain aeries, a crater-peppered lunar landscape, a view from the inside of some space station facility, a red desert and a mushroom cloud explosion joining others in the distance… Finally, a thin man with his arms outstretched, standing below a massive tower as electrical filaments raced across his body and then shot out and traveled through the air, the ground, the seas, traversing the world, hopping along transport lines that augmented its strength and powered an entire world, charging the atmosphere and sending out a pulsing, swirling shield of electromagnetic energy into the heavens…
Caleb’s mind reeled and he tried to pull his eye back, ground it, center it in some kind of familiar reality.
An anchor.
He needed an anchor. Some point in time and space to hold him from careening off the brink of insanity.
“You need to be the anchor,” came a voice. “You are the anchor.”
He blinked and the images swirled, coalesced back to a familiar room, with instruments and screens and windows, a staircase and doors. Framed pictures of lighthouses on the walls.
Back in the Montauk facility.
“It’s just like Pine Gap,” Caleb said. “We’re standing over many levels below us, and on…” He clenched his eyes shut and called up the image of the world he had seen before, with the crisscrossing lines. He staggered, leaned against a wall under a particularly desolate painting of a seaside lighthouse rocked in a storm.
“Something’s different about this place, though.” Turning his attention to the room, the windows, the very air. A song was playing on a turnstile, one he hadn’t noticed before. Darin’s “Beyond the Sea.” The audio crackled, and the lonely lyrics took on even more surreal significance.
It’s far, beyond the stars. It’s near, beyond the Moon.
Finally, he turned his full attention onto Boris. Boris, standing still, arms at his side, almost trembling. Looking slightly pale; not scared but more like in muted respect, as if standing before the grave of a particularly abusive uncle: having the last laugh, but only at a great cost.