“Don’t ever fuck with my business again,” Cecil’s assailant, a shirtless, chiseled local with an outstretched bamboo stick, rasped from between the reeds. He had appeared out of nowhere, and now Lopez and the others waited to see what would happen next. Several of them were bona fide killing machines, but they were also on vacation with no interest in getting involved in whatever this was all about. Fortunately, after a few seconds, Cecil took a deep breath, straightened up, and silently led them onward, limping now, while the man with the stick only glared after and then disappeared back into the reeds.
The underside of paradise, Lopez reflected as a newly somber Cecil silently handed them over to a colleague, who distributed their life vests and led them into their rented banana boat.
That underside was something they’d all begun to notice in the past day or so since their arrival on the island. “Everybody here is selling something besides what they’re selling,” Valucci had observed the night before, over rum-and-pineapple concoctions on a hotel balcony overlooking the outdoor pool. “The cabbies are all club promoters, the Jet Ski guys are ganja dealers, the dealers in the casino, mark my words, half of them are pimps.”
Jackson nodded sympathetically. “Lotta nerve these poor people have, ruining your tropical fantasy.”
Lopez grinned and took a long sip of his Bahama Mama. At thirty-six, he was the oldest in their unit, but more important, he had the most impressive pedigree by a long shot, and so the others gave him a certain deference. Spending this month’s block leave together had been his idea, though he hadn’t pushed any specific locale, just so long as it had turquoise water, his one sticking point.
And Cecil had been right. As the banana boat moved farther out from the shore, the water took on that greenish hue he’d seen in brochures and on the hotel website. While the boat bounced upon the waves and his companions launched into a tasteless rendition of “Day-O” with faux Caribbean accents that the driver in the attached speedboat must have really loved, Lopez closed his eyes and let the hot sun beat down on his face. When he opened them again, sometime later, they were moving back toward the beach, and he could make out the entirety of the hotel, a grand, glitzy structure of pastel-colored towers that loomed over the whole island. But it was only after they’d disembarked from the boat, all the unpleasantness about Cecil and the man with the bamboo stick forgotten, as they made their way back up the beach toward the hotel, that he spotted her. Tall and voluptuous, with chocolate-colored skin and shiny black braids spiraling upward around her head like an African queen, she looked far too regal to be braiding some tourist’s hair. But that’s exactly what she was doing, her fingers threading through the tresses of some vapid-looking blonde sprawled out on a beach chair, sipping a martini. Lopez wished he could stop in his tracks and just stare. Instead, he kept his eyes on her as he passed and glanced over his shoulder once or twice after, and five years later, when the whole trip to the Bahamas would feel like centuries ago, he would still remember the way she looked that day on the beach. Here was a woman, he’d remember thinking, who could be worth giving it all up for.
Giving it all up? The idea had once been unthinkable. But then, hadn’t doing the unthinkable marked his entire military career? Practically every move he’d made since basic training, they’d told him was not how it’s done, ass-backward if not technically a violation of protocol, and he’d pushed ahead and come out ahead. The idea of riding out his contract and then leaving the whole life behind and settling down with a woman he loved was so counterintuitive, would be viewed as such a boneheaded move and colossal waste by his superiors and fellow operators, that it suddenly seemed like one of the most daring and thrilling operations he could ever perform. In other words, for the first time in ages, the thrill was back!
He realized, of course, that this woman could be some kind of mirage. In that moment, with the sun striking her in that heavenly way, she might have looked like an angel, but what did he really know about her, besides absolutely nothing? She might not be retirement-worthy, after all. Instead, she might be like those beautiful sirens from ancient Greek mythology who would lure naïve sailors to their doom on the rocky coasts. He would need to use the next few days to find out.
That night, Jenkins and Harris left the hotel for something called the “Booze Cruise,” and he and Wang decided to hit up the Carnival, one of the hotel’s two casinos. While Wang bled his spending money at the blackjack tables, Lopez opted to take a stroll around the room, and he nearly spilled his drink, stopping dead in his tracks, when he caught sight of her again, standing by the slot machines, decked out in a hotel uniform and holding a drinks tray.
She was alone. There’d be no better time to approach than right now. Really, this was perfect. He didn’t even need an opener; he could just order a drink from her and take it from there. Could he order a drink from her for her? Would that work? Too cute? His whole pattern of thinking was becoming unfamiliar to him. He was a decisive man of action, not a neurotic; what was she doing to him? Now was clearly the time to act, and yet all he could do was stand there, utterly frozen, hoping she wouldn’t catch him staring. What was he waiting for? If you can recover control of a forty-five-thousand-pound Mudhen after losing eight thousand feet of altitude, he chided himself, you can talk to this lovely barmaid right now. But he was paralyzed with fear. And he liked it.
“You’re a soldier, aren’t you?”
The voice, coming from behind, had a thick Australian accent. He turned around, and a young woman was standing there, jet-black hair with blond or maybe orange highlights. She’d seen him and the others around the hotel, she told him, and could tell from their crew cuts and body language they were military. Her ex-boyfriend had been a reservist with the Coast Guard, she explained. Glancing over his shoulder, Lopez could see that his African queen was gone. That was okay; he clearly wasn’t ready yet. Next time, he’d somehow work up the cojones to talk to her, but in the meantime, he’d allow himself to take comfort in the easy interaction he was having with the Australian girl. Lauren, his consolation prize called herself. She was a grad student in chemical engineering at the University of Melbourne, having returned home after attending college in the United States.
“Ever been Down Under?” she asked.
Dewn Unda. He hadn’t. She asked what kind of soldier he was, and he told her he was an airman in the air force, to keep things simple.
She invited him back to her room, where they sat at a table by the window, drinking Bacardi and getting to know one another. Soon, he felt tipsy enough that he was almost tempted to go back down to the casino and try to talk to the beautiful drinks waitress again, but he realized he’d surely make an ass of himself now. Meanwhile, the girl told him about growing up in Perth and her experiences as the only white member of an Aboriginal dance troupe. But all the while, her body language told a different story. She wanted sex, and she wanted it now.
He waited in bed, checking e-mails on his phone, while she changed in the bathroom. Why did she have to change in there if he was going to be seeing her naked in a few minutes, anyway? Life, how full of mystery you are! When she emerged from the bathroom, she was still wearing her clothes. “Airman in the air force?” she asked. “Why so modest, Captain Lopez?”
How did she know his name? He wanted to ask her, but when he tried to speak, his jaw felt unbearably heavy. Actually, everything felt heavy, including his limbs. He couldn’t move anything! He glanced at the bottle of rum and the empty glasses on the table.
Shit. What had she done to him?
“If I had your credentials,” she continued, “I’d tell every girl I met. Navy SEALS, Force Recon, and, after all that, AFSOC? That’s a pretty impressive set of experiences. Unique set of skills.”
He passed out while she was still speaking, and when he came to, he was in an unfamiliar location, and the girl was asking him if he liked conspiracy theories. The conversation that followed would change his life forever.
Now, five years la
ter, they were having another conversation, and Rachel was changing his life once again. They were sitting, just him and her, in a bungalow somewhere in the bowels of the Docks, Ambius’s main headquarters and his home ever since that fateful trip to the Bahamas. Rachel was telling him that the hypothetical mission for which he’d been training these past three years was finally no longer hypothetical. They had figured out how the cosmic shield worked and, more important, how it could be removed. The technology had caught up. Of course, with Ambius, the technology never simply just “caught up,” but the less you knew about how exactly shit went down, the better.
“So the shield has been taken down?” he asked.
“Not yet,” she answered. “But it will be taken down before you get there.”
“Okay.”
“Right before.”
Lopez’s eyes widened. “Say what?”
“It has to go down right before you get there and go back up right after you leave. Otherwise, they’ll be able to follow you.”
Lopez furrowed his brow. “That even possible?”
“All the scientists and engineers say yes.”
“So how much time will that give me?”
“Twenty relative minutes.”
“Sounds awful tight.”
“It is.”
Lopez leaned back in his seat and looked out the window of the bungalow. Outside, an Ambius truck was wheeling what looked like a giant glass cocoon across a wide, empty lot. He turned back to Rachel.
“What will it look like?”
“What will what look like?”
“The main prize.”
Rachel smiled. “Apparently, a lot like an oversized lotus.”
“Lotus?”
“Like a big flower.”
“Jesus fuck,” he muttered. “So what are my odds?”
“Of mission success?”
“Of me not dying.”
She looked at him funny. “You never asked that before.”
“I’m asking now.”
Rachel took a moment to think. “Well, there are a number of variables. As you know, the Phoenix 12 has failed to launch in two out of seven tests. It won’t fail again, but statistically speaking, we should take it into account. If you survive that, and you will, you’ll need to make it all the way to the target. Then, if we somehow fail to deactivate the shield, you won’t know it, so you might suddenly find yourself anywhere from five minutes to five thousand years in the past. Otherwise, if everything has gone right and the shield is down, you’ll need to remain undetected from entry to exit. Likewise, the shield’s disablement will need to go unnoticed. Overall, I’d put your survival odds at 60 percent.”
Lopez took a deep breath.
“But that’s just on paper, Lopez,” Rachel said. “The reality is you can do this. More importantly, you’re the only one who can.”
He nodded, but his mind was elsewhere. She had been so beautiful, he remembered, far too regal to be braiding some tourist’s hair or serving drinks in some hotel casino. And he, the rising star of his unit, had been so brave so many times before, and, of course, at the moment he needed it most, his courage had totally deserted him. Things might have been so different today if he’d only acted. He might never have left Air Force Special Operations Command. His parents might know he was still alive. He might have been outside New Mexico more than twice in the past three years.
He had given everything up because they, and specifically Rachel, had convinced him this was his patriotic duty. Not to the United States of America but to mankind itself. So now he would be traveling nearly twelve light-years to steal some object whose power he had no conception of and for purposes that remained completely murky. From the beginning, the mission had been described to him in the loftiest terms. Humanity needs you, he’d been told. Lately, though, he’d begun to wonder if it was less about the survival of the human race and more about the same old ravenous hunger for dominance and power that had driven so many historical conquests and discoveries.
Rachel was now reminding him of how important the mission was, just how much was at stake, but he was only pretending to listen. And just as his mind couldn’t focus on any of that right now, he knew that in eight or nine weeks or whenever it would be, when he would hear the numbers being counted down in his headset and feel the g-forces pushing down on his chest, the fruition of five years of rigorous training finally come at last, he would be thinking only about the life he could have had if he’d just had the balls to talk to the woman from the beach.
CHAPTER 16
Iraj paged through the latest issue of Hyperion Starship, sipping a melted Slush Puppie and deliberately losing track of time. The rain had started around ten, had increased at about midnight, and now was a full-on storm the likes of which he hadn’t seen in New River since last November, when the local Dairy Land went halfway underwater and all you could see were its red gambrel roof and the top of a ceramic ice cream cone sticking out of the water. Iraj wondered whether he should go outside and sandbag the gas pumps, but he really didn’t feel like moving, and with Mr. Shokof away, it was so much easier to just stay inside the store.
Iraj turned his attention back to his comic book, a shameless rip-off of Star Hunters, which itself had begun as a “tribute” to what happened in California. As he read, he found his mind was adding to the story, twisting it around, a sure sign that his earlier espresso had failed. He eyed the wall clock: 3:30 A.M. He looked out the window, at the lonely pumps being pummeled mercilessly by the rain. No cars had passed this way in hours. True, even in monsoon-like weather, you never knew when some poor soul might suddenly show up needing gas or a cup of coffee, but, as Iraj figured, there was a reason for the expression “Fuck it.” He closed his comic and locked the store, then went into the adjoining storage room, where a dusty old mattress lay on the floor surrounded by Campbell’s soup cans, and spread himself out and went to sleep.
Sometime later, a noise startled him awake. His eyes now open, he didn’t move, just lay there listening. He couldn’t see much through the cracked door of the storage room, but someone was definitely in the store. He could hear them moving. Walking through the aisle, no doubt swiping whatever their heart desired.
Mr. Shokof’s Glock. It was in the drawer behind the register. Lot of good that would do. No less useless would be calling the police; he’d probably be heard making the call, and they wouldn’t come, anyway, not tonight. Moving very slowly, he slid himself off the mattress and onto the floor, then, crawling on his side, inched his way over to the cracked door and peered into the store.
A thin young man with rumpled clothes and a short, untrimmed beard was taking cans of vegetables off the shelves and dropping them into a suitcase. Probably a runaway, Iraj thought, though a little older than the ones who usually passed through. This kid looked like he was already out of his teens, maybe somewhere around Iraj’s own age of twenty-two. Most important, he looked harmless.
Iraj slowly got to his feet and regarded the sponge mop leaning against the wall. Not a baseball bat or a hockey stick, but it would have to do. The weapon itself hardly mattered, anyway, it was how you held it and the look in your eyes. He picked it up, spread it out between his hands like a ninja’s bō, and, kicking the door all the way open, barged out into the middle of the store.
The young man with the beard looked up and froze.
Like a deer in headlights, thought Iraj.
“Fuck you think you’re doing, kid?” he asked.
The young man just looked at him. Not a look of fear exactly, but of … what, expectation? Iraj couldn’t quite understand it until he realized the kid wasn’t looking at him but past him. Without moving, Iraj glanced up at the round security mirror in the corner of the ceiling. Sure enough, someone was standing right behind Iraj, a man with close-cropped hair who, despite sunglasses, seemed vaguely familiar. Someone he knew? Before he could turn around, there was a flash of movement from the man in the mirror, and Iraj was hit in the back of th
e head and knocked out cold.
“He’ll be okay,” Leland said, and he and Shawn went back to dropping items from the shelves into their suitcases.
Twenty minutes later, their stolen Honda Civic now loaded up with supplies from Iraj’s convenience store, they pulled off Arizona’s Interstate 17, Leland at the wheel, and onto the dirt road that led back to the abandoned farm. They arrived at the barn where they’d slept the past four days and got out of the car. The rain was still coming down in sheets.
“Should we unload?” Shawn asked, gesturing toward the trunk.
Leland shook his head. “No point. Assuming this lets up, we’re out of here at dawn.”
“But this is the best spot we’ve had in weeks!”
“When that kid wakes up, he’ll call the cops, and the whole area will draw heat.”
“Over a minimart? You don’t think that’s a little paranoid?”
Leland flashed Shawn a look that reminded him paranoid wasn’t one of the words you used around the man.
Inside the barn, they removed their wet clothes and hung them on rusted hooks. The rest of their belongings lay strewn all about: clothing, blankets, maps, cans. The air was humid and smelled like rotted wood. Shawn climbed into one of two grimy sleeping bags that lay on the floor while Leland, hunched over on a low bench, sorted through a crumpled collection of maps. He had banned the use of smartphones or tablets, anything that might have a SIM card or GPS that could allow them to be tracked.
“Clarkdale, Sedona, Payson…,” Leland muttered to himself, while Shawn just stared at the black mold on the walls, small spiraling dots on the pale wooden boards that looked like Hubble shots of the Milky Way with the black and white reversed.
A sudden flash of light illuminated the room, followed by an impossibly loud crash that seemed inches away.
Shawn startled, while Leland acted like he hadn’t noticed anything. Shawn watched him a moment. “Did they have lightning there?” he asked.
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