Free The Grays by Whitley Strieber Page B

not to be interfered with in any way. Nobody cared to challenge the grays, but now was one of those dreadful moments when something had to be done.
    Early on, there had been a fear that the Soviets would find out how the collective minds of the grays worked, and announce to the world something like, “We have seen the future and it is Communist.” However, nobody except the United States Air Force possessed a gray. Therefore the rest of the world—including the remaining U.S. military, the intelligence community, and the government—was at best minimally informed. Within the Air Force, fewer than twenty people knew about this project.
    He put his hand on the phone. There was nobody else in the world who could make this decision, or even offer advice. If he was wrong, there was just no way to tell what the grays would do.
    Could he bring about the end of the world when he picked up that phone?
    He lifted the receiver, punched in some numbers. “Jimmy, Rob. Do you have my glowboy coordinates?”
    “Yes, sir. It’s been ground bound for a while, sir.”
    “I need a scramble out of Alfred moving on it
instamente.”
    “Yes, sir!”
    He paused, then. Took a deep breath. “God be with us,” he said into the phone. His next step was to inform Wilkes of what was happening, and that required setting up a listening device on the call. Mr. Crew expected all contacts with Wilkes to be logged, recorded, and sent to him.
    Personally, Rob was convinced that Crew was right to be suspicious of Wilkes. He believed that the man was using the empaths to discover new technologies, and selling them to the private sector. Also, Wilkes’s pathological hatred of the grays was inappropriate. He believed that they were bent on invasion. They scared him and that’s why he hated them. But hate doesnot win wars, knowledge does, and that’s what Wilkes’s empath unit was supposed to be gaining from the one remaining gray in captivity. But damned little useful information came out of the new empath.
    Rob did not understand the grays but he didn’t hate them. In fact, he found them incredibly interesting. They’d been here for fifty years and they hadn’t invaded yet, so that didn’t seem to be a very real concern. What they did to people was weird, but you didn’t see folks disappearing or being injured, at least not physically. Obviously, though, whatever the grays were doing to the people they abducted was damned important to them. Otherwise, there would not be threats. They were taking something from us, no question of that, but in the way a farmer takes milk, not meat.
    The information flow, Rob believed, was being shunted to Wilkes’s real buddies, the quiet companies who fed off the United States’ one-hundred-and-twenty-billion-dollar annual black budget. In Rob’s opinion, there was a pipeline that led, through Wilkes, from Adam right back to the industry. It would certainly explain why an Oklahoma orphan boy, who had nothing to live on but his soldier’s pay, called a multimillion-dollar house in Georgetown home . . . and why an officer whose work was in a hole two hundred feet below Indianapolis, Indiana, even needed a presence inside the Beltway.
    “Mike, it’s Rob. Sorry about the late hour, but I have a situation. There’s a glowboy on the ground near Wilton, Kentucky. I know, it’s very odd and very disturbing. What’s even more of a concern is that there are civilians in the field around him. He’s got his plasma deployed and he’s ready to run, but he ain’t running. There have gotta be video cameras down there, all kinds of trouble. I’m doing a scramble, I’ve got to get that guy out of there. Do you think you could get Glass in the hole with Adam? Let’s reassure him that it’s just a friendly warning that they might spill their own secret. And let’s please find out what we can about what in sam hill they’re up to.”
    He waited until he heard Wilkes’s grunt of assent. The good colonel did not like