Strangers

preemptive strike. Dom did not think Falkirk would make a move until Brendan Cronin, Jorja Monatella, and perhaps other victims had gathered at the Tranquility. But once they were in one place, they would need to be prepared for trouble.
        Now, in the Blocks' kitchen, Ned Sarver picked at his breakfast without appetite as he spoke of the images that had disturbed his sleep. At first he had dreamed of being held prisoner by men in decontamination suits, but later they had worn either lab coats or military uniforms, an indication that the biological danger had passed. One of the uniformed men had been Colonel Falkirk, and Ned described that officer in detail: about fifty years old, black hair graying at the temples, gray eyes like circles of polished steel, a beakish nose, thin lips.
        Ernie was able to confirm the word-portrait that Ned painted, for Falkirk had also been in his nightmare. The amazing coincidence of the same man appearing in both Ned's and Ernie's dreams made it clear that his face was not merely a figment of imagination but a memory of a real face that both Ernie and Ned had seen two summers ago.
        "And in my nightmare," Ernie said, "another Army officer referred to Falkirk by his first name. Leland. Colonel Leland Falkirk."
        "He's probably stationed at Shenkfield," Ginger said.
        "We'll try to find out later," Dom said.
        The barriers to memory were definitely crumbling. That prospect boosted Dom's spirits higher than they had been in months.
        In Ginger's nightmare, which she recounted for them, she had not been the only person being brainwashed in Room 5, the room she had occupied that summer and which she now occupied again. "There was a rollaway bed in one corner, and the redhead in it was someone I'd never seen before. She was about forty years old. They had her connected to her own IV drip and EKG machine. She had that… vacant stare."
        Just as Ernie and Ned had shared a new development - the appearance of Colonel Falkirk - in their nightmares, Dom and Ginger had shared this other discovery. In Dom's dream, there had been a rollaway bed, flanked by an IV stand and an EKG monitor, and in the bed had been a young man in his twenties with a pale face, bushy mustache, and zombie eyes.
        "What does it mean?" Faye Block asked. "Did they have so many subjects for brainwashing that they more than filled all twenty rooms?"
        "But," Sandy said, "the registry showed only eleven rooms rented."
        Ginger said, "There must've been people on the interstate, in transit, who saw what we saw. The Army managed to stop them and bring them here. None of their names would appear on the registry."
        "How many?" Faye wondered.
        "We'll probably never know for sure," Dom said. "We never actually met them; we only shared rooms with them while we were drugged. We might eventually remember the faces of those we saw, but we can't possibly remember names and addresses we never knew in the first place."
        But at least those reprogrammed memories, those tissues of lies, were dissolving, allowing the truth to show through. Dom was grateful for that much. In time, they would uncover the entire story - if Colonel Falkirk did not first come after them with heavy artillery.
        

        
        Monday morning, while the group at the Tranquility ate breakfast, Jack Twist was being escorted to a safe-deposit box in a vault of a Fifth Avenue branch of Citibank, in New York. The attending bank employee, an attractive young woman, kept calling him "Mr. Farnham," for that was the false identity under which he had acquired the box.
        After they used their separate keys to remove the box from the wall of the vault, when he was alone with it in a cubicle, he opened the lid and stared in shock at the contents. The rectangular metal container held something that he had not put there, which was an impossibility since only he knew about the box and possessed the only master key.
        It should have contained five white envelopes, each filled with five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar and twenty-dollar bills, and indeed that money appeared to be untouched. This was one of eleven emergency caches he kept in safe-deposit boxes all over the city. He had set out this morning to remove fifteen thousand dollars from each, a total of $165,000, which he intended to give away. He opened each of the five envelopes and counted the