I raised my eyebrows. “Stock markets?”
If they were talking about stock markets, then things had to be back on track, or at least on a road leading to it.
At least it hadn’t come to nuclear war.
India was still protesting that it hadn’t launched the anti-satellite weapons, but that was posturing, the intel guy said. He explained how the terrorists had used the initial confusion of the anti-satellite attacks between India and Pakistan to obfuscate what they were up to, at least at the start.
When GenCorp lost uplink with the first few dozen—and then few hundred—satellites, the fact of their losing comms was obscured in the discombobulation of the moment. Another strike team of terrorists attacked the GenCorp headquarters and killed everybody there. That’s what the SEAL team that arrived in the morning found.
No trace of the second team of terrorists yet.
The senator and the clean-cut man explained how the terrorists hadn’t only hit commercial satellites. The operators had started to move satellites around once the threat surfaced, when the Islamic Brigade announced what they were doing.
Problem was, the attackers also hit a lot of dead satellites that couldn’t be moved. A massive debris field was still spreading in several orbital planes. It might take a decade or more to de-orbit by itself from the lower orbits, and maybe never for the stuff higher up.
Even medium Earth orbit was compromised, but they said they had ways to work around it. Get satellites up higher, punch missions through the debris. It might take years, but there were ways to fix it.
Not everything added up, but it had only been a few hours since it had all gone down.
The senator and the intelligence guy excused themselves, and Lauren brought Olivia and Susan in. We laughed and cried a bit more, then Damon offered to take everyone down to the cafeteria. Lauren said I must be tired.
Only Chuck remained.
The machines beeped in silence for a few minutes as he hovered by my bed.
“What?” I asked.
“Making sure you’re okay. I called your brothers. Terry is coming down. He said he’s going to tear Oscar a new one next time he sees him.”
“My brother is coming?”
“It’s a zoo out there, but he’s going to try. You have a nice room, but the rest of the hospital is a mess. They’re running out of supplies and the hallways are crammed with people.”
“That bad?”
“Not as bad as last time.”
I put my head back down. That sounded slightly reassuring.
“Makes sense now,” Chuck said, “why my Jeep didn’t work in New Orleans. Terek or Irena must have done something to it. Anyway, I’m enjoying no GPS. Makes me use my own head a bit more.”
And here came that smile I’d seen too many times before.
I said, “I can see from that jasshonkey grin on your face that you’ve got something you want to say.”
“Jasshonkey? Now I know you must be feeling better.”
“Out with it. Come on.”
He paused, just long enough to be theatrical. “I was right.”
“About?”
“Conspiracies. Remember, at the start of all this, I said it wasn’t an accident?”
So that’s what he’d been waiting for. He was gloating. He had to be right. Even with me half-dead in a hospital bed, he needed to get his digs in.
Chuck added, “And I didn’t like those two, Terek and Irena, or Pyotr and Amina, whatever they’re really called. I pegged them right from the start.”
That they were terrorists? He knew that? I shook my head in amazement. He was stretching the truth a little, or more than a little, but who was I to burst his bubble? And when was stretching the truth ever a crime between friends?
So I said, “Yeah, you were right, Chuck.”
He beamed. “I told you. Sometimes conspiracies are real.”
EPILOGUE
I WAITED TILL the tiny hours of the morning, until Lauren and the kids had gone back to the senator’s house and even Chuck had left. I was fine, I said. The nurse made me a mobile station, an IV rack on wheels, so I could get up out of the bed and walk around a bit.
I was fine, I kept telling them, and the senator’s house was only fifteen minutes away. There were nurses and doctors here. I told them to go shower, change into fresh clothes, and get some sleep.
They needed it.
We all needed it.
But I really needed to be alone for another reason.
Through the slatted blinds, the hallway outside my ICU room looked like it had emptied out. I listened past the beeping machines, strained to hear voices. Nothing. Five minutes past three. Outside my window, the night was pitch-black.
The wind had died down. The storm had passed.
Or had it?
Grunting with effort, I swung my legs off the side of the gurney bed and eased myself to the floor. Lauren had left slippers. Leaning against the bed, inched my toes into them. Unclipped the finger sensor monitoring my heartbeat and blood oxygenation. One of the machine’s beeping noises slid into a single flat note. I gritted my teeth, took the pain, and forced myself to my feet.
And stood unsteadily.
Two seconds later, my door opened.
A nurse, the dark-skinned one who was a sweetheart, appeared. “You okay, honey?” she said. “You want me to put that back on?”
I held onto the metal upright of my mobile IV rack on wheels and shuffled across the linoleum floor toward her. I tried not to grimace at the lancing bolts of pain in my side. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“You got one in your room, sweetie.”
“Can I stretch my legs?”
“You sure that’s a good idea?”
I reached the door and opened it fully. “Please.”
The hallway was mostly empty.
Three nurses on duty.
And of course, several men and two women in dark suits sitting across the hallway, half-asleep, and a half-dozen young men in khaki holding assault rifles, not asleep, but alert and upright and silent. There were two police officers in uniform at either side of the room next to me.
They weren’t here for me, all these people.
They were here for him.
Them still being here meant he wasn’t dead. Yet.
The nurse asked, “You want some help, darling?”
“I’m fine.” I checked the tubes snaking out from under my hospital gown and made sure none of them were hanging so low they’d get stuck under my IV trolley’s wheels.
I shuffled forward a few more steps and felt a cool breeze blowing up my backside. I realized the back of this gown wasn’t tied up, that my naked ass was hanging out in the breeze.
I didn’t care.
A few more steps and I was at Terek’s ICU room door. Or Pyotr. Whatever his damn name was.
The two cops manning either side roused themselves. “Yes, sir?” the one on the right asked. “Can we do something for you?”
“I need to speak to him.”
“You can’t go in there.”
“The hell I can’t. I’m the one that got him here in the first place.”
“He’s not conscious.”
“Then I’ll wake him up.”
“Sir, you can’t—”
“It’s okay, officer, I’ll take it from here.” The intelligence guy that had come in with the senator had magically appeared, as if from nowhere. “My name’s Tim,” he added and extended his hand.
I held onto the metal stand with both hands, as much for balance as anything else. “Nice to meet you. I need to talk to Terek.”
I couldn’t stop using that name. What was the point of switching?
“Sure, sure thing. Why don’t we try?” Tim nodded at the two officers, who looked at each other and shrugged. This was above their rank.
We opened the door.
I shuffled my feet forward into the semidarkness to the side of the bed.
There he was. Terek. Pyot
r?
The same boyish face that looked like he hadn’t started shaving yet. The thick mass of brown hair. He had always been pale, but in the dim light he looked almost translucent. His lips a shade of purple-blue, dark rings under his eyes.
Was this the face of a mass murderer?
He had tried to kill my son.
Tried to kill me.
Then again, he might have saved my life when I’d gone headfirst into the Mississippi. Something about it didn’t add up. Or maybe it did? Was that his wife back at the house? What would I do for Lauren, if pushed all the way to the edge? If she was in danger?
A stab of guilt.
Had I left his wife behind?
When we took off in the truck, I knew my gut instinct was finally right. I made sure Irena—Amina?—didn’t get in with us, but Katerina I hadn’t been sure about. Not at the time.
“Terek,” I said. And then louder, “Terek!”
No response.
I let go of my IV pole with my right hand and slapped his face. “Terek, wake up. It’s Mike. I need to talk to you.”
Tim, the intelligence officer, hung back in the shadows.
“Terek, I need to—”
His eyelids fluttered, and then opened. His lips were cracked. “Mike, I’m so sorry.”
“Was that really your wife? Katerina?”
He nodded and closed his eyes.
I closed mine as well. “What color is her hair?”
The beeping machine tracking his heartbeat quickened. “Her hair?”
“You heard me.”
A pause for a second. Then two. Finally he answered, “Blond, of course.”
“You’re lying. That woman’s hair was brown.”
“Maybe she, I don’t know—”
The machine’s beeps faltered into an irregular staccato.
I said, “Lauren told me she saw Katerina working with them. She saw her on the plane from Hong Kong. How do you explain that? You’re lying. Why did you do it?”
“I had no choice.”
“You’re lying. Stop lying.”
An alarm went off. His face contorted and he gasped, “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
The door opened behind me. One of the nurses said, “Mr. Mitchell, you need to get out of the way.”
Another alarm went off. His body arched. Hands tried to pull me away, but I held onto the edge of the bed. I leaned to Terek’s ear and said, “What wouldn’t I understand?”
“He’s going into cardiac arrest!” someone shouted behind me.
“Why us?” I said.
His eyes opened, so wide I saw the whites glow in the light of the fluorescent tubes that blinked on. “You think you were the only ones?” He spat the words out. “You have no idea what is coming.”
He started laughing and coughing at the same time. Blood spattered from his mouth. “This is only the beginning, you didn’t stop us, you have no—”
“Out of the way!”
I was dragged backward and lost sight of Terek behind a mass of white coats.
“We’re losing him,” someone in the pile called.
Sneakers squeaked against linoleum floors as nurses and interns raced up the hallway and into Terek’s room.
The kid was dying, I realized. I was the one that shot him.
Killed him.
Holding my IV pole and trolley, I backed out of the way, straight into the steady arms of the intelligence officer.
I looked him square in the eye and said, “This is only the beginning?”
Note from the author:
A sincere thank you for reading.
The adventure continues in CyberWar, the final book in this series (now available for pre-order, search for CyberWar on Amazon).
If you are looking for more right now, and haven’t read the prequel CyberStorm, I highly recommend it. It’s been translated and published in over thirty countries around the world and earned close 10,000 reviews on Amazon (search for CyberStorm on Amazon).
Another connected novel in this world is Darknet, which is set in the same universe, but spaced in time between the events in CyberStorm and CyberSpace (search for Darknet on Amazon). This novel is set in New York, and follows one man’s journey deep into the tech underworld of Wall Street.
Mr. Damon Vincent Indigo from this series also appears in my Atopia Chronicles trilogy. These novels are set fifty years in the future after CyberStorm, when Mr. Indigo is an elderly gentleman presiding over a trillion-dollar empire on the island colony of Atopia off the coast of California. Atopia was my very first novel, and the style is different—more high-concept sci-fi.
If post-apocalyptic is more your style, then try out my “Science Fiction Book of the Year” award-winning four-book series Nomad, where a mysterious deep-space object threatens to destroy the solar system (search for Nomad on Amazon). These novels follow the adventures of Jessica Rollins as she protects her family and navigates and new Earth after a truly cataclysmic disaster.
My novel Polar Vortex, a new stand-alone title, is about a mysterious aircraft disappearance, and is now under development as a limited TV series (search for Polar Vortex on Amazon). This is by far one of my favorite books, and is a great sci-fi mystery from start to finish in an homage to Agatha Christie.
And finally, I have a new sci-fi detective series, the Delta Devlin Novels, which follow the career of a rookie New York detective as she faces some harrowing cases. The first “prequel” in this series is The Dreaming Tree, which is available right now, as is the second book Meet Your Maker.
Thank you again for supporting my writing and family, and all my warmest wishes to you and yours,
Matthew Mather
March 2020
p.s. If you enjoyed this novel, please don’t forget to write a review, not matter how short, because these very much help sales for indie authors like myself.
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