Night Talk Page 8

  Greg found himself stepping in to run interference for those whom Rohan lashed out at. Greg believed nobody had a lock on the truth about strange encounters. He knew that from his own experience. He also believed that listening to others was an art form that many people didn’t possess. Rohan was too full of himself to patiently listen to someone else’s experiences or opinions.

  Tall, skinny, and full of himself, if Rohan hadn’t experienced a strange encounter that turned into a money machine for him, he struck Greg as a guy who would have ended up in a corporate cubicle answering customer questions about phone service problems and telling coworkers at break time how they should lead their lives.

  On the flip side of the coin, Greg read Rohan’s best-selling book and had him on his show for hours talking about his strange encounter and was convinced that the man was telling the truth about having been abducted.

  The encounter occurred when Rohan had been a student at UCLA five years earlier. He volunteered for a sleep-dream study experiment for course credit and some cash. The study sounded like something from the acid sixties—an injection of designer drugs to test how they affected dreams.

  Rohan claimed that he came out of the overnight sleep-dream experiment with weird flashes of shadowy events and terrible headaches, but nothing he could put a finger on—until nature played a hand and he was struck by lightning while caddying on a golf course.

  Nearly getting crispy-fried opened a memory door of what Rohan had experienced that night he took part in the university sleep-dream study—he remembered he had been taken by aliens to a laboratory where his reproductive function was examined. The entities that examined him wore formless masks, gloves and clothes so he couldn’t see their precise shape or features, but saw enough to be convinced that they were reptilian.

  Rohan then wrote his best-selling book about his experiences, claiming that the professor who oversaw the study, Carl Murad, was a lapdog and procurer for aliens, who controlled the world.

  Made well heeled by the success of the book, he brought a lawsuit to force the university to let him examine the sleep study’s computer system and records, but lost the case.

  With Rohan having no legal way to get the files, Greg wondered if the man had persuaded Ethan to hack into the university’s computer system or that of Professor Murad. Rohan was pretty wild about his accusations and even kept challenging Murad and the university to sue him for libel if they were innocent.

  Murad, a psychology professor, was also a noted skeptic about abduction claims and had appeared on Greg’s show several times to debunk them. Greg invited both believers and skeptics onto the show to state their positions in order to get a complete picture of an issue.

  The professor said he had studied hundreds of abduction scenarios and maintained that most encounters were described as almost exactly the same, what he called a monkey-see, monkey-do syndrome based upon what the abductees had heard others say. He also claimed that abductees mimicked scenes and physical objects they had seen in movies.

  Murad’s position was that none of the UFO sightings or alien abductions reported had an extraterrestrial basis. The UFO sightings from witnesses whose credibility could not be doubted he simply brushed away as weather phenomena, terrestrial aircraft or other terrestrial occurrences, quoting air force “investigations” for his conclusions.

  He debunked most abductee claims with accusations of fraud, lies, hallucinations, psychopathic desires for publicity and every other embarrassing and humiliating explanation he could come up with. Trashing the claims as strongly as he could was his meat and potatoes for selling books and gaining a reputation as an “expert.”

  On the show Greg asked Murad why he and the university never responded to Rohan by getting a court-issued restraining order. Murad’s reply was there was no way anything good would come from suing a student who’d had an unfortunate reaction to a scientific experiment. Rohan would make wild accusations that would turn any proceeding into a media circus. “What would come out of an attempt at a reasonable dialogue would be another best-selling book castigating the university and me,” Murad said.

  Murad claimed he regretted Rohan had a “pathological reaction” to the medication that was used but that Rohan had not been capable of sitting down and discussing the situation rationally even before he had been medicated.

  To Greg, Murad was a cold bastard, but smart and analytical, with a pit bull grab-at-the-throat approach to arguments. There was no question that some abduction claims and UFO and other strange-encounter sightings were faked or even the product of delusion. Murad used the obviously faked claims to attack the credibility of all encounters, no matter how credible the person making the claim was.

  It was pretty much the tactic the government had used when dealing with the unknown or unexplainable—deny and pull the covers over it.

  Murad had reproached Greg for what the professor called giving the lunatic fringe a place to express their experiences and opinions.

  Greg’s reply to him had been that as Hamlet told Horatio after seeing the ghost of his murdered father, there are more things in heaven and earth than Murad realized—including the paranormal.

  Ethan. Rohan. Murad. Greg realized something about the triad. He was a connecting link among them.

  21

  Leon waited in a white van parked near Rohan’s apartment building. His instructions were to wait in the van until the man he had followed previously on Broadway downtown arrived and went into the building. Once the man entered, he would be given more commands.

  He usually didn’t focus on potential victims for long even before he began getting instructions from the Voice—when he saw someone he would like to harm but the opportunity didn’t arise, he would move on, forgetting about the person.

  His blood boiled now as he waited for the man he had tried to run down on the street. The pain that had been inflicted on him for disobeying had not lasted long in his groin, but was so severe he’d screamed aloud as his testicles felt like they were being twisted in a vise.

  This time he had no intention of disobeying. But he had a special place in his heart for the man who had caused him the pain and would settle the score in ways that the man could not even imagine in his worst nightmare.

  While he waited he booted up his computer tablet, which provided a steady stream of words of praise for him, horror movies, S-and-M porn and the most violent and sadistic action games ever devised. Being denied use of the tablet by the Voice as punishment for indiscretions was as stressful as physical pain.

  As he sat in the van playing a computer game that was banned in every civilized country he was not aware that everything he said or did was being captured by cameras. Nor that when he left the van, audio devices and cameras hidden in his clothes and tools kept him under constant surveillance.

  He put aside his tablet as his prey arrived. Soon after the man got out of his car and went into the apartment building, Leon got instructions to go into the same building. He got out of the van, carrying a gunmetal gray, tubular device two inches in diameter and a foot long. It had a handle and an on-off button at one end. He wore overalls with the name of a heating and air conditioning company on a small tag on the front and spread out on the back. The business name on the overalls matched the name on the van, but Leon didn’t pay attention to the names. The name, overalls and van were all changed frequently by his providers. He paid little attention to detail and did no planning more than a few hours in advance, and those plans usually related to eating, sleeping or being rewarded.

  Right now his attention was directed toward the man who had caused him so much pain the night before. The thought of cutting open the man’s chest and ripping out his heart while it was still beating made Leon’s mouth water.

  22

  Rohan jerked the door of his apartment open as soon as he saw Greg through the peephole.

  “Get in here.” He pulled Greg in and took a step out to peer down the hallway before closing the door and l
ocking it.

  Red-eyed and haggard, Rohan and his clothes needed a pit stop. His dark green A-shirt and running pants were wrinkled and stained, his beard scruffy. He was frenzied and looked ready to launch from whatever upper he had taken to get himself out of a downer.

  “You okay?” Greg asked.

  “Were you followed? Did you check—watch? They can do it without you knowing. Cameras are everywhere, peeping down from the sky; they don’t need choppers.”

  “Calm down,” Greg said. “I wasn’t followed, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not difficult for the government to keep any of us under surveillance.”

  Rohan hurried to his balcony’s glass doors, pushed them open and stepped outside. He took a quick look up and down the street before rushing back inside, sliding the doors closed behind him.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” he told Greg.

  “You called me.”

  “Yes—yes—you’re right, I called you.”

  “You mentioned Ethan Shaw.”

  “Yes, Ethan, they got him.”

  “Who got him?”

  A car alarm went off out on the street.

  “What’s that?” Rohan rushed back to the balcony, pushing the doors open.

  “Rohan! It’s a car alarm, that’s all. It’s stopped.”

  Rohan stared at Greg for a long moment and seemed to deflate. He came back into the room, looking defeated.

  “No sleep, I need sleep. I’m confused. Too much shit coming down.” Rohan waved at the mess in the apartment. “Too much of everything. I didn’t use to have much more than the clothes on my back and a car that didn’t run half the time. Now I got money and nothing’s right.”

  The apartment was as confused and cluttered as Rohan’s mind—Chinese take-out boxes, dried-out pizza, beer cans and an almost empty bottle of vodka. The room had a chemical, sweet smell. A small burner on the coffee table had whitish chunks next to it.

  Rohan looked as if he had spent the night fighting an attack from flesh-eating zombies. Maybe he had. Real ones or those created by inhaling crack cocaine.

  “You have to leave,” Rohan said. “I got a call. The police are coming; they want to talk to me about you and Ethan. I don’t want them to catch you here, they’ll try and pin something on me. They’re after me, they—”

  “How’d you get a call? Your phone’s been disconnected.”

  “My phone’s been disconnected?” Rohan stared around, puzzled. “My phone’s been disconnected. You’re right. How’d I get a call?”

  To accommodate the police, the phone company could turn a phone line off so calls couldn’t come in and then turn the line back on to allow a call through, but Greg didn’t share the observation.

  “I need to talk to you about Ethan,” Greg said.

  “Ethan’s dead.”

  “I know, I saw him commit suicide.”

  “Suicide—hell no, they killed him.” He stared at Greg, wild-eyed. “If you saw them kill him, you must be one of them.”

  “Rohan—”

  Rohan backed off. “Keep away from me!”

  “Listen,” Greg said softly, “I came because you called me. Ethan called me last night then jumped out of a window of the building across the street. I saw him fall, so did—”

  “He was pushed, they killed him.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “They did, the ones that Murad works for, the ones that control everything we do.”

  He was excited, manic, moving around as if he expected threats to suddenly materialize in the room.

  “Were you using Ethan to hack into the university to get evidence of your abduction?”

  “That bastard Murad is hiding the names of people he fed to aliens in that sleep program he uses to supply them. The judge wouldn’t let me subpoena the list—he’s one of them. They’ve got the cops and the judges in their pocket.”

  “What did you mean when you said Ethan got too close to them? What’s the secret file that Ethan was after?”

  Rohan was too wired to stand still. He paced a few steps one way and then back. “They’re going to get us, we don’t stand a chance. We have to go undercover, figure out—”

  “Stop. No one’s going to do anything to us if we keep our senses and fight back. We can go to the news media—”

  “All controlled by them.”

  “Who are ‘them’? We need—”

  “You know who they are,” Rohan shouted, “the controllers, the ones in charge, the ones that Murad works for.”

  “Calm down and listen to me, Rohan, you’re talking in circles. We need facts we can back up, not unsupported accusations. Ethan got into a secret file and he or someone else did a money transfer from my bank that I didn’t authorize and the feds think I did. How did he—”

  The doorbell rang. It sounded like a shot in the room. The two men froze and both looked to the front door.

  Rohan said, “The police. They said they were coming.”

  “Did someone say I was coming? You know of a fed named Mond? Something called the Interagency?”

  “You have to get out of here. If they find us both here they’ll think we’re in it together.”

  “In what?”

  “The back, out the back.”

  “Tell me what’s going on, what you and Ethan were doing.”

  The doorbell rang again.

  Rohan pushed him. “Out the back, the back.”

  Greg went slowly, trying to get Rohan to focus. “Did Ethan give you a file? Do you know how he got the money from my account?”

  “They can’t find us together.”

  It was useless. The man was wasted—mindless and panicked.

  Greg followed Rohan through the kitchen to the back door but he hesitated at the door as Rohan fumbled with the deadbolt. His instincts told him not to run but face whatever was coming at him from the police, but Rohan was vibrating and ready to unravel, so he stepped out.

  Rohan slammed the door behind him and hurried to the front door as the doorbell rang for a third time. His mind was swirling. It hadn’t been on track since he started on alcohol and cocaine to get it into whack.

  He jerked the door open to a man in a utility worker’s uniform.

  23

  Greg wavered on the landing, trying to decide whether to go down the steps and leave or barge back into the apartment. Getting caught sneaking out the back as if he had something to hide would not just be humiliating but be interpreted by Mond and the police that he was involved in whatever Rohan and Ethan had going.

  It was now a given that Rohan had some hacking deal going with Ethan but he hadn’t pinned Rohan down about the secret file that Ethan was supposed to have passed to Greg. He was sure Rohan was involved in the scheme.

  He heard something—an exclamation from Rohan? He reached for the door handle and gripped it but froze without turning it, not sure what he was hearing. Rohan was so high he could be shouting at the cops or even being cuffed so he wouldn’t interfere as they ripped apart the apartment as they had done his.

  Greg struggled with whether to leave and fight another day or confront Mond with Rohan there in the hopes of getting Rohan to blurt out the truth. He decided the hell with it—if the police ask Rohan questions about him and Ethan, he wanted to hear the answers.

  He opened the door and paused to listen. No sound was coming from the living room. He moved through the kitchen to find the living room empty, the front door closed. Had they arrested him? In and out that fast? Without a wrecking crew searching the place? Not likely. He called Rohan’s name and checked the bedroom and bathroom.

  Excited voices came through the doors to the balcony that Rohan had left open. The voices came from the street two stories below. It didn’t sound like cops but a crowd.

  Greg ran out onto the balcony and looked down. Rohan was lying on the sidewalk, with people gathered around. It looked like neighbors, not police. He was facedown, his head at an unnatural angle to his body, as if his neck had snapped
. He wasn’t moving; blood was on the concrete next to his head.

  A woman kneeling beside him stood up. “There’s no pulse.”

  A teenage boy with his foot on a skateboard pointed up at Greg. “That’s him—I saw him throw the man over.”

  Greg shouted down, “No, you didn’t! Not me.”

  “I saw it!”

  “You didn’t see me!”

  “Call the police,” someone yelled and someone else said they’d been called.

  Greg backed away from the edge of the balcony and went back inside, half stumbling. Mindlessly, in shock over seeing Rohan’s lifeless body and the kid’s crazy accusation, he went through the kitchen, out the back door and down the stairs to the parking lot in the rear of the building.

  He made his way past the side of another apartment building and to the street beyond. His car was on the street that had the crowd and he wasn’t ready to face accusations again.

  He wasn’t going anywhere, just walking, trying to get his head on right, trying to comprehend what had happened. The kid was right about one thing—Rohan had been thrown off the balcony. The kid was a typical eyewitness who didn’t get a good look at the person he saw push Rohan, but now had an image of Greg burned into his head because he’d connected up the two in his mind. An image he would convey to the police as an impartial eyewitness.

  Rohan had expected the police to arrive and ask questions about Greg, had opened the door to someone, and now he was dead. Like Ethan. High on drugs and dead from what appeared to be suicide but wasn’t, because the skateboarder had seen someone put Rohan over the edge.

  Greg realized that besides the kid’s testimony, his own fingerprints were in the apartment; his car was nearby on the street. Someone in the crowd might have recognized him or would when there came an explosion of publicity about him: two deaths and stolen secrets.