It wasn't exactly a palace inside, but it was in a better state than most of the buildings Michael had previously checked out.

  Though it was certainly faded, there was actually carpet on the stairs and the paint on the walls had not yet started peeling. A small room at one side of the entrance hall, probably a walk-in cloakroom in the

  Old Age, had been converted into a desk clerk's room and a young man was standing behind the raised counter, checking his books. He was wearing a T-shirt with FUCK YOU printed across it and he had shoulder-length hair, a drooping moustache and a ring through his nose. He looked up when Michael entered and his gaze was suspicious.

  'Yes?' he said curtly.

  Tm looking for somewhere to stay,' Michael said. 'Do you have anything?'

  'Where do you come from?'

  'Cincinnati.'

  'What are you doing here?'

  'Look, I just want a room and—'

  'We like to know who we're taking in,' the young man interjected bluntly. 'Particularly when people are coming from elsewhere. I mean, what makes anyone want to come to Washington if they don't work for the cyborgs? So what are you doing here?'

  Michael was already working, using his powers of telepathy, breaking into the young man's thoughts, and he sensed the fellow's instant revulsion at the very thought of the cyborgs. Also, he felt no drawing upon his own thoughts, which indicated that the young man had no parapsychological skills, which in turn meant that he had not been brainwashed and was perfectly normal. For this reason, Michael decided to tell the truth.

  I'm looking for someone,' he said, then added his next lie. 'A girlfriend. She comes from this area but was sent to Cincinnati by her mother after her father was abducted. I met her in Cincinnati. We became involved and then her mother got sick and she had to come back here to look after her. They both disappeared a couple of weeks back and I want to find them. At least, I want to find her.'

  'They were probably abducted as well,' the young man said, now looking a lot less aggressive, sounding sympathetic. 'And if that's the case, you haven't a prayer. They'll be gone for good, pal.'

  'I've been told that some of the abductees are released eventually.'

  'Some of them,' the young man agreed. 'But if your girlfriend's released, you probably won't want to know her. She'll be one of them.'

  'I have to know one way or the other,' Michael said, 'so I'm determined to find her. Now what about that room?'

  The young man studied him thoughtfully for a moment, then grinned and shrugged. 'Why not?' he said rhetorically, then he pushed his register across the counter. 'Here, you have to sign the book. Don't use your own name if you don't want to. So long as I get you to sign, I'm perfectly legal and that's okay with me.'

  'Do the cyborgs come around here to check?' Michael asked as he entered his false name in the book.

  'Not the cyborgs — the walking dead. The ones they've brainwashed to do menial tasks for them. They make surprise visits now and then, just like the old IRS guys. So if you see anyone checking my books, just stay out of sight.'

  'I will,' Michael said.

  The young man held out his hand. 'Ben Wilkerson,' he said, introducing himself.

  Michael shook his hand. 'Mike Johnson.'

  Ben gave him the room key. 'Room four, second floor. You want anything, check me out first. I'm pretty cool about Chinatown.'

  'I will,' Michael said. 'See you around.'

  'Ciaof Ben responded, winking, grinning and forming an 'O with his thumb and index finger. 'Relax and enjoy.'

  With his rucksack still on his back, Michael made his way up to the second floor and then let himself into his room. It was small and spartan, with an old pine chest-of-drawers, a pine wardrobe, a steel-framed bed and a double-ring electric hob. The toilet facilities, he knew, would be communal, but the room was at least clean, as were the bedclothes. Removing the rucksack from his shoulders, he placed it on the floor, then proceeded to unpack it and place its contents, mostly clothes and toiletries, either in the chest-of-drawers or in the wardrobe. There were no maps or reference books about Washington DC in the rucksack as he now carried all that information in his head. The only unusual item was his high-powered notebook computer, which he placed on the cabinet beside the bed.

  By the time he had finished unpacking, which took about fifteen minutes, it was still only two in the afternoon, so he spent the rest of the afternoon in meditation, seated in the lotus position on the floor and concentrating intensely on his inner self. In this way he was able to keep a sharp edge to his various parapsychological skills and, at the same time, roam telepathi-cally over the capital, checking it out. In his mind's eye, he saw the flying saucers hovering over the White House, the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, the cyborg patrols all around them. But, try as he might, he still could not break into those buildings and was forced to accept, once more, that they were being protected by parapsychological skills far stronger than his.

  The only way he would be able to enter the White House would be to go in in person.

  Time passed quickly in meditation, in what was virtually a trance state, and when he came back to Earth, to his material shell, evening had fallen. Now being too tired to eat, not wishing to begin his work until the next day when he would be fresh and fully alert, he decided to sleep. He deliberately left the curtains open and, once he had stretched out, fully clothed, on the bed, he kept his eyes open as well, letting himself be lulled by the moonlight.

  As he lay there, he thought of Ira Fisher and gradually realized just how cleverly the cyborgs could brainwash their victims. At some level of his consciousness, Fisher had remained exacdy the same as undoubtedly he had been before being brainwashed: a heavy drinker with rheumy, bloodshot eyes and a normal human aversion to the rule of the cyborgs. Thus, he could talk to truly normal human beings without making them suspicious. On another level, however, when it seemed that there might be a need for it, such as when talking to a stranger, the brainwashed part of his consciousness took over and turned him into a robotized worker for the cyborgs. More interestingly, he had clearly deployed parapsychological skills, telepathic skills, in order to break into Michael's thoughts. The cyborgs, therefore, when brainwashing their victims, were now implanting at least some of the parapsychological skills that they, the cyborgs, possessed themselves. This, Michael realized, would make the walking dead more dangerous than ever.

  Closing his eyes, he tried to sleep, but oblivion did not come easily. Eventually, just as he was falling asleep, he was awakened by the almost imperceptible pressure of what he knew to be an infrasound of the kind made by many flying saucers. Opening his eyes again, he saw a small, circular light, like the beam of light from a large lamp, but in this case pulsating rhythmically, passing slowly across the dark room, obviously beaming in from something that was gliding by just outside the window. Even as he saw that light, he felt the infrasound still more strongly. It made him jerk upright on the bed.

  Forcing himself to control the fear that had swept instinctively over him, he rolled off the bed and padded on bare feet to the window, across which the pulsating light was still passing slowly. He waited until the light had completely crossed the window and was moving away from the building. Then, cautiously, still fearful of being seen, he peered around the curtain.

  A seamless, silvery-white, metallic sphere was drifting slowly in mid-air above the road. Spinning rapidly but silently on its own axis, it was giving off an eerie, pulsating glow and casting a thin, laser-like beam of light on the walls and windows of the buildings it was passing. It was, Michael knew, one of the many

  remote-controlled, self-regulating devices that the cyborgs in the White House and elsewhere used for observation of the capital each and every night. That beam of light — a sensor that could record the movement of solid bodies, including human beings — was also a laser weapon that could stun, paralyse or even kill.

  Watching the small spinning disc as it moved away from his building, Michael was torn between fear and rage, though thankfully the healthy rage soon took command. Returning to his bed and sitting upright against the headboard, he opened his notebook and sent an e-mail to a false Cincinnati address, which was actually a home page in Freedom Bay. The message, which could only be read on Freedom Bay's computers, was to Dr Lee Brandenberg.

  The bird has found a nest.

  Message sent, the bird closed his eyes and slept.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The first nightmare was the paralysis. One of Gumshoe's adolescent fears had been the thought of having a stroke and being paralysed completely, not able to move a muscle, while still being highly active mentally. Now, as he moved up the ramp of the flying saucer, a paddy wagon, either dragged by the cyborgs, though they appeared not to be touching him, or propelled by some means beyond his comprehension, he was living that nightmare: completely paralysed from head to toe, but still mentally active. In a weird way, he felt that he was floating up the ramp, though this might have been due to his complete lack of tactile sensation. This feeling persisted as he reached the top of the ramp and entered the saucer.

  All white. Everything. At first he was almost blinded by the light. Then his eyes, which were all he could move, adjusted to the brightness and he saw that he was surrounded by walls of what looked like white steel, perhaps a combination of magnesium and titanium. In his desperate attempt not to panic from fear of his paralysis, he tried as best he could to focus on what he was seeing and noted that he was in a small, square-shaped area that had a closed white-steel door on one side, a low ceiling shaped like an inverted half-eggshell, and a corridor running away to his right. Everything was made of the same metallic material to form that dazzling, featureless whiteness.

  Still not able to feel anything, he nevertheless sensed the presence of the two cyborgs behind him and found himself advancing at a walking pace along the corridor, which also had a concave ceiling and, windowless, was featureless too. The floor, ceiling and walls all looked as if they were moulded miraculously from one piece — though this was certainly an illusion, Gumshoe decided, recalling the way that the outside panel had dropped down from the apparently seamless fuselage of the saucer to form a ramp to the ground. The corridor appeared to be curving around the central disc of the craft and it led him to the only door he had so far seen.

  Trying to choke back his steadily mounting dread as his every impulse fought against entering that

  room, but unable to resist, still being paralysed, he moved helplessly through the doorway and saw that he was now in a perfectly round space, about twenty metres in diameter, with white metal walls, lighting from a hidden source, and a transparent dome that gave a 360-degree view of the surrounding terrain, which, he saw with relief, was still the broad, moonlit expanse of West Potomac Park. The complicated, highly advanced control console of what was clearly the crew's cabin ran all the way around the lower half of the circle and three crew members' chairs were placed equidistant along it with another cyborg sitting in the middle one.

  Again, Gumshoe filled up with the impulse to turn away and make his escape. But his numbed body moved forward against his will, taking him to a position in the centre of the floor, just behind where the seated cyborg was located. Gumshoe remained there for a moment, still unable to move, while the cyborgs behind him took the two free chairs in front of the console. All three cyborgs then began working the various controls, not speaking, as if reading each other's minds.

  Suddenly, a soft bass humming sound filled the control cabin and Gumshoe saw, through the transparent dome, that the lower body of the saucer was rotating slowly, with lights of many colours flashing on and off in quick succession, one after the

  2CI

  other, around its wide rim. The lights kept flashing on and off at an ever-increasing speed until they formed first a kaleidoscope, then a whitish, plasma-like glowing. By now, the outer body of the saucer was spinning at an incredible speed until its edge had blended into that whitish glow, becoming almost invisible.

  Still desperately trying to combat his mounting terror by concentrating fiercely on what he was seeing, Gumshoe grasped at what he had learnt from his research on the Net and recalled that the saucers were widely believed to be propelled either by advanced ion propulsion, electromagnetic and microwave propulsion, antigravity (gravitic) propulsion, nuclear-fusion pulse rockets, or a combination of two or more of those systems. Studying that plasma-like glowing aura around this particular saucer's spinning rim, he assumed that it came from the ionization of the surrounding atmosphere and that some form of ion propulsion was involved.

  Keep thinking, he thought desperately. Just keep thinking. Don't let the fear make you lose your mind . .

  . Fact: The control cabin is independent and gyroscopically stabilized. When we take off, the antigravity system will . . . Oh, Jesus, it's taking off!

  Though he still could feel nothing, he saw that the saucer was rising vertically off the ground. It ascended slowly and steadily, offering no sensation of movement, until it was about forty metres above the moonlit lawns of the park. Suddenly, as quickly as Gumshoe blinked — which, mercifully, he could still manage to do — the landscape disappeared and was replaced with the vast, star-filled expanse of the night sky, with the lights of Washington DC, Virginia and Maryland spread out in a glittering tapestry far below. As Gumshoe looked out, disbelieving, still with no sensation of movement whatsoever, triangular-shaped plates of the same white metallic material rose up from the circular base of the transparent dome, all around it, like the petals of a giant flower, to slot into each other and cover the dome completely in what looked like a perfectly seamless covering.

  Now Gumshoe could see nothing except the interior of the

  control cabin, with the three cyborgs seated in their chairs, facing the ever-blinking console and not making a sound. They might as well have been dead.

  We must be flying above the atmosphere, Gumshoe thought. Oh, Jesus, where are we going?

  Even as he was thinking this, he sank slowly through an opening that had appeared in the floor. Again,

  he did not have any sensation of movement and only knew that he was being borne downwards, still standing upright, when he saw that the walls around him appeared to be rising. Startled, he glanced down and saw that the floor was rising towards him and that his legs were already halfway through a circle-shaped trapdoor, his feet resting on a round piece of metal that had been part of the floor.

  The hairs on the back of his neck stood up and his heart raced in panic.

  Oh, God, no! he thought, briefly imagining that he was sinking into hell, only getting his wits back when the steel plate beneath his feet came to rest on a lower floor.

  He found himself in a gloomily lit circular room where other abductees, also paralysed, were standing around him, their eyes moving frantically left and right, glazed over with dread.

  Shocked beyond measure, Gumshoe tried to call out to them, but no words emerged, brutally reminding him that his vocal cords had also been paralysed.

  Oh, God, he thought, I'm paralysed and dumb. I'm like a fly in a spider's web. Phase, God, tell me I'm dreaming!

  But he wasn't dreaming. He could still blink his eyes, move his eyeballs left and right, up and down, and he did so experimentally to prove to himself that he was real and still had at least some self control.

  Glancing about him once more, he met those other fear-filled eyes, saw the sweat on their foreheads, sensed their dread almost as palpably as if it was his own, and knew that if he didn't keep concentrating he might lose his mind.

  Don't look at the others, he thought, in case the sight of them makes you feel worse. Don't let their terror get to you. Close your eyes. Think of other things.

  He closed his eyes and tried thinking.

  The saucer was still in flight — though, since there continued to be no sense of movement, he could only assume this from the lack of change in the bass humming sound. It had only been flying for a couple of minutes now but, given the speed at which the paddy wagons could fly, it must have already travelled a great distance. If it had merely flown him to the White House, they would have been there in seconds.

  Where the hell were they going?

  Fusion propulsion, Gumshoe thought, frantically trying not to think of other things. Electromagnetic or ion propulsion, combined with gravity-shielding, could account for the saucers' ability to rise vertically, make sharp right-angled turns and hang nearly motionless in the sky. Yes, that was it. Ionization and electromagnetic discharges could account for that plasma-like glowing and gravitic propulsion, or an anti-gravity shield, could explain the saucer's lack of turbulence and the absence of sonic booms. All well and good so far, but . . .

  Oh, Jesus, he thought as a fresh wave of terror washed over him, I can't think! My mind's going!

  He opened his eyes and was instantly confronted with the sight of those other unfortunate abductees —

  four women of various ages, three mature men, a couple of adolescents, possibly Speed Freaks, and even two children. All were standing there in that gloomy, nightmarish lighting, in that featureless circular room, and all were absolutely motionless except for their frantically moving eyes, which shone with pure terror. Shocked by that sight, Gumshoe closed his eyes again and tried to focus his thoughts.

  Okay, okay, he thought, speaking resolutely to himself, if only in his mind. We're now flying above the atmosphere, possibly. (Can the paddy wagons do that? Certainly the other saucers can.) And that would need some other kind of propulsion, which gets us right back to fusion . . . Internet

  theory of the late, great nuclear physicist, Stanley T. Friedman . . . 'If you use the fusion process properly, you can kick particles out of the back end of a rocket that has ten million times as much energy per particle as you can get in a chemical rocket.' Fuck rockets. What about flying saucers?