Second Sight Read Free Page A

in Area 17 andthat his work had nothing at all to do with cancer research or even the new strategic air command initiative. Case could only have been recruited to develop a secret weapon to combat the new superpower, the Soviet Union.
    The Cold War was a time like no other. People in neighborhoods in the 1950s lived under the prospect of imminent annihilation. All across America the mournful sirens wailed to test their systems and evacuations to fallout shelters. Children were taught to crawl under their desks and avoid the flying glass from windows. Shelters were constructed in every basement and backyard. TV and radio broadcasts were regularly interrupted by earsplitting warning signals.
    And rumors abounded: The Russians had a machine that could affect the thoughts of entire populations. The Russians were testing a death ray in the city of Novosibirsk. The Russians were using high-voltage electricity to control the world’s weather.
    Whatever was really going on behind the Iron Curtain, no one could say, but it was clear the United States was in an arms race with the Soviet Reds and the world had already seen proof—in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—that mankind was becoming capable of anything.
    McCullough didn’t know what happened to the boy, but he was sure it had something to do with what went on behind the gates of Area 17. He was equally certain that the army would not have wanted civilians finding their soldier alive and talking.
    He thought about the journal in his pocket. None of his men had seen it, he was certain. It was probably personal and should be returned to the boy’s family. But something else told him that whether harmless or not, it would be a mistake to mention it to the military. That to mention it would only bring trouble to the finder.

2
N AZARETH H OSPITAL
    P HILADELPHIA , P ENNSYLVANIA 2008
    There was too much time to think in this place, to relive past mistakes and reflect on the truth of age-old maxims. Too much time to consider what grim news the machines surrounding you might be collecting.
    It didn’t matter that she was blind. Nothing could alter the clinical milieu of the place. Forget about counting to ten, inhaling and slowly exhaling, focusing on “happy thoughts” rather than the needles in your arm or the array of wires that found their way to your arms and head.
    Sherry Moore had always considered the possibility of an early death. She’d suffered major head trauma as a child. Cerebrally blind since the age of five, a condition of the brain not the eyes, she suffered retrograde amnesia, unable to recall events before the accident in 1976. She also could visualize the last memories of dead people. If that didn’t tell you something was wrong with the wiring in her head, then nothing would.
    Now she had been exposed to deadly radioactive cesium 137.
     
    It had started two weeks before in the Four Corners region of New Mexico. A maintenance worker curious about the rotting smell in a rest area Dumpster found the decaying body of a young female. The unidentified girl, five or six years old, had what appeared to be burn marks on her hands and face and was taken to Albuquerque’s Presbyterian Hospital, where she was autopsied by a forensic pathologist. The pathologist found no evidence of sexual assault, and toxicology screens ruled out common poisons or pathogens. In fact, but for profuse bleeding of the gums, she looked perfectly normal.
    Then in the dark of the night a tractor-trailer ran over a woman lying on Route 491 near Newcomb, New Mexico. The driver said that by the time he saw the outline of her body in his headlights it was too late to bring the fifteen-ton rig to a stop. An elderly physician in Shiprock—who sometimes filled in as coroner—conducted an autopsy of the sunburnt-looking body and concluded the woman had died of cardiovascular collapse brought on by an overdose of methamphetamines. It really wouldn’t have mattered if the truck had stopped or not, he told