They Came With the Rain by Christopher Coleman

Author:Christopher Coleman [Coleman, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Christopher Coleman
Published: 2020-06-22T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Two months before the rain

Winston Bell stared at the phone as if it were a screaming baby in a crib, watching it with a look of both annoyance and concern. He slowly closed the book he was reading and placed it on the sofa cushion beside him, and then he closed his eyes in thought, considering whether to answer.

He decided to let it ring out this time, but he knew that would only delay the inevitable; there was little doubt the next call would come within the hour.

The weekend of the monitors was a stressful one for Winston now, and though the mysterious infiltrators of the Grieg Radio Telescope had yet to visit him again since that one strange morning four months earlier, Zander had advised him—warned him—of a follow-up call that would come well before the day of the event. There had been no specifics as to the time frame of the call, but to Winston, four months removed seemed about right. He couldn’t be certain it was they who were calling now, but to the core of his soul, he knew it was.

And there was another thing he knew as well: although Zander and his associates hadn’t returned since that first visit, they—or someone connected to them—had been monitoring him the whole time.

He hadn’t seen any trucks near his estate, nor pedestrians stalking around the perimeter of his property, but there was little doubt he was being surveilled. More cars than usual passed on the road now, makes and models that Winston had never seen in the area before, several of which slowed to a crawl before finally moving on. This rolling scrutiny happened at least once a week now, as if the driver were attempting to locate an address on a mailbox or on the façade by the door. But Winston knew that somewhere in the back seat there was a man snaking an antennae through a crack in the window or trunk, pointing it toward his home, ensuring he was interrupting the frequencies with the proper consistency and signal levels, keeping in compliance with the arrangement that had been made months ago in his parlor.

Winston was fine with the monitoring though; over these last four months, he had performed his duties with absolute vigilance, despite his doubts about the effectiveness of the signals, which wasn’t for him to argue. Zander had stressed the importance of daily transmissions—several times a day for hours at a time was his preference—enough that the analysts at headquarters would question their own readings and then ultimately dismiss them as useless, ruined by the noncompliant citizens of Garmella. It was an absurd plan as far as Winston was concerned, one that seemed to overestimate the impact his scrambling device would have on the Grieg’s readings, and underestimate the scientists who analyzed them. But that was the deal he had made, and for the last four months, a day hadn’t passed without him upholding his end of it. It was a fact Winston had become quite proud of, frivolous though his actions may have been.

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