After the Sanchez family had gone, Eli took a seat in the grass next to her. "I meant to tell you something earlier. But I wasn't sure if I should."

"What's that?"

"Well, to apologize, first. I was out of touch for a while a couple of weeks ago ... during what, I am now confident, was my last trip to Salt Lake."

"What was this?" She knew the time frame of which he spoke, and something began climbing up her throat. He hadn't been in Utah at that time. But why would he ...? She decided not to ask herself.

"Well, I finished that job, and finally got paid. Woohoo! But then I got approached by a guy I used to work with." He paused and looked at her carefully. "Are you still hung up on all things paranormal?"

"Yeah, you know I am." she said. Despite everything, she couldn't shake thoughts of it. But right now, her thoughts were of how she wished she'd come up with some excuse to convince Eli to take a hotel room for the evening. It hadn't crossed her mind until that moment, and something awful swept over her. It took her a moment to fight it back.

"Alright, backstory," he said with a sigh. "About five months ago, I got approached by the wife of a guy I used to work with, Brian Gissom. I was his commanding officer a few years back, and his wife, April, told me Brian was dead."

"Oh, my God."

"Yeah, except he wasn't killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. He died while he was stationed at some sort of facility in Montana. He apparently spent a lot of time on the work site, so April didn't notice for a few days that he hadn't phoned. She waited a day, nothing. On the day after that, she called his supervisor. No comment. Three days later, they called her and said Brian had been killed in some sort of work-site accident. No further details followed."

"Eli, how is that possible?"

"Uh ... it isn't ordinarily. But Brian worked with a lot of contractors, and the unit policy was to not fraternize with them, so April didn't really know any of his coworkers or their families to compare notes. But April isn't the kind to get pushed around, so she started pushing back. She slowly figured things out, and it ends up something like thirty people were killed in this so-called accident."

"How did we not hear about this in the news?" He had her attention.

"I'm not sure, but here's the funny part. When April tracked me down, she claimed she was getting all sorts of grief over this. She said she was being followed, people were tapping her phones, and, well ... all manner of paranoid things. But here's the rub. Brian was a fairly moral guy, and, despite the fact his job was highly classified, he unburdened himself to April one day. He told her that the sight he was working at conducted some sort of live human experiments."

"You're kidding me," she gasped. It was a shock. "Did you believe her?"

"At first?" He made a groaning sound. "Not at first ... and I'm still reluctant. She certainly was distraught when I saw her. And she had no proof of her claim other than a brief talk she'd had with her husband almost two years before."

"Still, strange things?"

"My thoughts exactly. So, I made a few phone calls for her and was basically told by everyone I contacted that it was nothing. It was just an accident. But no one wanted to give any details. So, I called her and told her that."

"What did she say?"

"She thanked me, and that's the last I heard from her."

"There's always a 'but.'"

He nodded. "Fast forward four or five months. I'm sitting in the restaurant of this crappy little hotel I usually stay at when I'm in the Salt Lake area, and another old army buddy comes and sits across from me. He was ... well, his name isn't important. Let's call him, Joe. Joe was a warrant officer who used to work for me, not a top performer, but a fairly likable and moderately competent guy. Anyway ...."

"He asks you about April."

"Oh, very, very good," he laughed. "But Joe's a bit shrewder. He asks me if I've heard about Brian Gissom. Now, I knew what he was doing from moment one. No army intelligence officer is just going to happen to bump into me at some fleabag hotel in the more dismal suburbs of freaking Salt Lake City. But what irked me was the fact he tried to be clever. If he asks about Brian, naturally I would bring up April, which makes it look like the whole conversation about April was my idea. If I don't bring up April ... and he clearly knows I've met with her otherwise he wouldn't be talking to me ... I've just shown myself to be deceptive."

"What did you do?"

"I told him to blow it out his ass. Uncle Sam does not pay my freight anymore, so I don't have to take that shit. It was clear what he was he up to, and I told him."

"Eli ... are you in trouble?"

"No. Not at all. But after that, he admitted what he was doing and asked for my help." There was another pause as he seemed to think. "He, um ... asked me to come with him to this place outside Salt Lake called Gunway Proving Grounds, a place that, in theory, is a highly classified black site, so classified that no one is even supposed to know it exists. But you can't hide fifty-thousand acres, even in the middle of the Utah desert, and everyone and his brother knows about this place. But I digress. I promised him two days of my time, largely because now I'm curious about the stuff April told me."

"Why did this take two days?"

"Kate, I have no idea, but I thought it was a mistake the moment I got to Gunway. They had me housed in a crappy old building with locks on every door, which meant I had to ask permission to go from place to place ... and Joe, who drove me there, promptly disappeared after we arrived. So, now, I'm isolated, dependent on them to eat, sleep, and move around. And, worst of all, they let me stew in my own juices with nothing to do for about three hours before they sent in this kid to do my debrief. What an idiot. I could have killed Joe."

"Cause he fucked you in the butt?"

As was his usual, Eli began to laugh. "No. He's a counterintelligence agent. Fucking people in the butt is the job description. I could have killed him because he honestly thought that amateur shit was going to soften me up. The debriefer they sent in looked like he was fresh out of school, and ... look," he said, changing tone, "the big risk of human intelligence collection is that a collector might actually spill more information than he collects. I was counting on that with this kid, and he didn't fail me. He was a fairly good questioner, kept a neat desk and a well-ordered notebook ... clearly fresh out of training. But I've never seen anyone so inept at elicitation. You remember what that is, don't you?"

"Elicitation? Collecting information from someone without them knowing it ... oh, oh, oh ... that's what Joe tried on you at first."

"Exactly. But Joe isn't half bad at it. The way he first approached me probably would have worked on anyone else. But this young guy ... kack ... you elicit better than he does."

"So, all was cool then?" she asked, now immersed in the story despite herself.

"Even better than cool. When bad elicitors get tired or get pissed, they tend to get very ham-handed. I ended up sitting with this guy for ... ugh, a day and a half, maybe more ... which is an unusually long time for a friendly debrief." Eli leaned closer and spoke softly. He was using his grown-up voice again. "And that's when it happened. At the end of all that annoying shit, this guy got flustered and straight-up asked me a series of questions that made me think he or someone else might have been listening in on you and me."

"Are you serious? On us ... talking?"

"That's what I thought for a split second," he said in a voice even lower. "I mean ... this young guy droned on for so long, I thought for the briefest of moments he was just playing dumb and I'd carelessly stumbled right into something. But then I realized, it really was all about April, because he just blurted these questions out."

"What did he ask?"

"He asked me whether she had told me anything about the existence of superhumans, or whether I personally knew anything about them, or whether I knew anything about government experiments with superhumans."

Kate sat there breathless, and Eli continued.

"That part of the debrief only lasted about two minutes before the door opened and someone called my debriefer outside. I didn't get a good look at the guy at the door, but he seemed familiar, which must have been why they sent in that young dud to debrief me. I probably knew everyone else on Joe's team, and they wanted to send in a stranger. Anyway, it was obvious the second he asked those questions that that information was the only thing they were interested in finding out."

"Superhumans? Like Flying Guys??"

"Kate, I have no idea," he shrugged. "I didn't know what they meant by 'superhuman,' I didn't know what was meant by 'experiments,' and I sure don't know if it connects to anything you or I have seen. But you see why I wanted to wait and tell you this in person?"

"Are they tapping our phones?" A sudden, creeping fear went up her spine.

"No," he chuckled, "not us specifically. But you never know what three-letter agency might be listening these days. Still ... if we discuss this stuff in the future, maybe it should be in person?"

"Definitely. And you didn't learn anything else about superhumans?"

"Not a thing. But I was pretty certain the interview was over, and I'll be honest, I wasn't sure whether I was in custody at that point. But I bitched for a few minutes, and the next thing I knew, a car appeared, and some kid drove me back to Salt Lake."

"What do you think it means?"

"Again, I have no idea. This may all just be nonsense. It may not connect to anything. But I know you're interested in such things and that you'd like to know.

"Thanks," she smiled her best smile. "If nothing else, it was another lovely Eli story." If a word of it was true, she thought ruefully.

"I'm glad you enjoyed it. And maybe you can tell me something now?"

"What's that?"

"Why you've been sulking around all day like you just lost your best friend."