“Yep.”
Discreetly, she slipped him a small USB drive, which he put in his jacket pocket.
“Was Auslander useful?”
“To an extent.”
“An extent? He’s supposed to be the best quantum biologist in the world!”
“He was good. We’re still essentially stuck.” Burke sighed with only slightly exaggerated exasperation.
Rachel glanced around and dropped her voice a few registers. “Dillon mentioned something about a house in Arizona.”
Burke smiled. “A house in Arizona? He tell you any more?”
“Not really. Said I needed to hear it from you.”
Burke laughed. “I can’t tell if he’s discreet or doesn’t want to deny me the pleasure, but I like the man either way. Not just a house, an abandoned old Victorian mansion. A drifter spent a night there last week with his dog, a beagle. Dog starts barking in the middle of the night, runs out, and, whaddaya know, digs up a fucking corpse in the backyard.”
Rachel leaned forward. “Who?”
“Some runaway kid. Anyway, he calls the authorities, and they do their usual dog and pony show and send some fingerprint samples over to Clarksburg. Guess the match.”
Rachel smiled knowingly. “Starman.”
Burke nodded. “But not just Starman.”
Rachel’s eyes widened. “So that means the story that Iranian gas station clerk told…”
“Exactly. Looks like they really are together. Quite the power couple, no?”
“But why would either of them kill some runaway kid in a mansion?”
“Who the fuck knows?”
“Well, are the cops launching a murder investigation?”
Burked laughed. “Course not. We took care of everything. Body doesn’t exist anymore, nor does any record of the incident. But this happened near Black Canyon City, and the gas station was in New River, and I know neither of those places mean a thing to you, but what it indicates is that they’re heading north and taking their sweet time about it. We should know where they are in a few days, maybe even less.”
“And what then?”
“Same old shit; we’ll do what we always do. Just a little different this time.”
“Different how?”
“Successful, I hope. No squads this time around, not that we’ve even got many left. Our friend used ’em all up as target practice. We’ll be using toys instead.”
“Toys?”
Burke nodded. “Toys we couldn’t get access to as easily in places like Trondheim or Alicante. Toys that don’t go running for the hills at the sight of something a little out of the ordinary. Toys that don’t die.”
“Got it. And what about our other friend? You plan to take them out together?”
“One fell swoop, I should think.”
Rachel nodded and looked down at her recorder as Burke observed her.
“What?” he asked after a few seconds.
She looked up, wiped her bangs from out of her eyes. “I think he might still be of value. The other one.”
“Value?”
“I think he’s smart enough to be worth keeping around. And unlike his friend, he’s not exactly dangerous, and I think I can maybe even turn him.”
Dr. Burke laughed. “Roach, if you were in love with him, you should have told me last time!”
She stared at him in a serious way he was long familiar with. She’d been giving him that same look ever since her freshman year at Northwestern.
“All right. I’ll have a chat with Upstairs, and we’ll see if we can’t bring your little boy in alive. For now. Just for you.”
She smiled, appreciatively, sort of.
“But just answer me this one question,” he continued, “if you’d be so kind.”
“Go for it.”
Dr. Burke raised his eyebrows and set his voice to a whisper. “Are you in love with him?”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Come on, Roland. You know there’s only one thing I love in this world.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
Rachel leaned in close and took her time before answering. “Us.”
Dr. Burke took another sip of scotch and set it back down on the bar. His breathing had become a little heavier. “Us?”
The faintest, nearly nonexistent smile formed on her lips, and she leaned in even closer so that her face was mere inches from his.
“The human race.”
CHAPTER 23
The afternoon sun streamed in through the high windows of downtown Flagstaff’s abandoned cigarette factory, casting twisted shadows around the room as it passed through a spiderweb of rusted pipes and scaffolding. In the corner, just below a yellow sign warning of a “275-“PER-SQUARE-FOOT FLOOR LOAD,” Shawn lay sideways on his sleeping bag, propped on an elbow and poring over a map of San Diego. It seemed that the best course of action would be to take a bus from Flagstaff’s Greyhound bus station to San Diego, then catch a ride to La Jolla. Or maybe he could cab it; might be safer. Either way, he’d need to steal some cash from Leland before he left.
There was a chance, he realized, that Professor Glass might not remember him. But the chance was small. At Brown, and later Columbia, professors took to Shawn in varying ways, some astounded by his easy mastery of complex concepts and theories, others considering him overrated or cocky (or “snot-nosed,” as one assistant professor had put it when he didn’t know Shawn was within earshot). But very few would have forgotten him. Professor Glass had actually been one of Shawn’s earliest champions, encouraging him to switch his major from astronomy to physics because, as he put it, “You’ll never get a deep understanding of art by studying paint.”
Glass had been a visiting professor from UC–San Diego, where he had since returned and had been made professor emeritus. Shawn had last seen him four years ago at a New York conference on quantum information theory, and though he had seemed frail then, he was still sharp and certainly acted as though he knew Shawn, even if it was hard to be sure he wasn’t merely being polite. Either way, Shawn had remembered him as a thoughtful man with considerable personal integrity. During the years at Brown, Glass had been someone Shawn could confide in. Maybe he still was.
A door on the factory’s floor level opened, and Shawn quickly returned the map to where he’d found it, scrambling on his hands and knees and tossing it back onto a pile of other maps and atlases situated near Leland’s sleeping bag. He then crawled back into his own sleeping bag, closed his eyes, and pretended to nap. Below, familiar footsteps crunched broken glass and God knows what else as they ascended the steel staircase.
“Get your shit together,” Leland said a few moments later. Shawn opened his eyes and lifted his head. Leland was staring down at him, wearing his standard-issue baseball-cap-and-sunglasses disguise and carrying a case of Poland Spring bottles under each arm.
“What? Why?”
“Old woman at the corner store. I paid her for this water, and she stared at me. Too long.”
“So that means what?” asked Shawn. “Maybe she was just trying to recognize you since you’re dressed like a celebrity hiding from the paparazzi.”
“Time to pack up.”
“Where are we going?”
“Northwest.”
Just perfect, thought Shawn. San Diego was southwest. He stage-yawned. “Could we stay another few hours? I’m totally wiped.” The odds the next few hours would afford him the opportunity to steal money and slip away were practically zero. But leaving with Leland now would kill his plan completely.
“You’ll sleep in the car.”
Their Honda Civic zoomed down the interstate, Shawn staring out at the scenery, most of it forest, as Leland drove. If Leland’s aliens truly attacked, he wondered, would there still be real forests left afterward? Or would everything be mostly scorched earth, like in some postapocalyptic movie? For a moment, he had a horrifying vision of chained human survivors doing the bidding of grotesque-looking alien overlords. He had to smile when he realiz
ed the scene had come straight from a Halloween episode of The Simpsons.
“So,” Leland said without taking his eyes off the road. “Were you planning a trip to the zoo?”
Shawn’s smile disappeared. He turned to Leland to ask what he meant, but stopped himself. He sensed this wasn’t going anywhere good, and it would be wiser to stay silent.
“One of my maps was folded on San Diego,” Leland said. “Not by me.”
Shawn turned back to the window and just stared out. Don’t acknowledge anything, he told himself. Give the bastard nothing.
“UC–San Diego, I guess,” said Leland. “Tadashi Yamada is still there. So is Oren Glass, though God only knows if he’s lucid. Glass might make sense. He did a lot of moving around back in the day; you might have met him anywhere.” He smiled and shook his head. “You still don’t get it, do you? Try this on for size. Promising young physics prodigy gets unexpectedly thrown out of his graduate program. Months later, he turns up, thin and disheveled and going on about wild conspiracy theories and doomsday predictions. Oh, and where has he been? Hiding out with Andrew Leland, of course. Do the math.”
“I don’t care,” Shawn said quietly. “No one believed the prophets, either, but they didn’t let that shut them up.”
Leland laughed. “So now you’re a prophet.”
“I’m someone with urgent information,” said Shawn, turning back to Leland. “And you’re the one who doesn’t get it. Back when I was obsessed with finding you, writing all those letters, do you know why I cared so much? Because despite what you were telling everyone, I believed you knew something. You knew something the whole world wanted to know, and you were just keeping that shit to yourself, hoarding it, when you owed it to the rest of us to share it. Well, now I know something, something that affects everyone. Something that is life or death, and you’re demanding I just keep it to myself. Well, fuck that. I will not remain silent anymore. And I do not need your permission.”
“You’d be making the biggest mistake of your life.”
“No, I already did that, remember? I ‘fucked everything up,’ just like you said. So now I’m gonna try to do something about it. Maybe it will help; maybe it won’t. Worst case, no one believes me and they lock me up somewhere I can’t do any more damage.”
“You should be so lucky to get locked up before Ambius gets to you. Not that it would really protect you from them.”
“I’m not afraid of Ambius. I am afraid of sitting on the sidelines and watching civilization as we know it get torched when I could have done something to prevent it. So if you want to stop me, you’re just going to have to kill me. You wouldn’t be the first person to try to end my life just to keep my mouth—”
They both heard it at the same time. Helicopter blades, except that when they looked out the back windshield, the vehicle flying in the sky above and behind them was nothing so familiar as an ordinary helicopter. Six furiously spinning rotors extended up and out from a sleek, black circular body, underneath which protruded what looked from this distance like large skis, though they were most likely something much more sinister. Backlit by a pink-and-gray sky, the exotic hexacopter was an awesome sight to behold. Shawn had certainly never seen anything like it, though he was quite sure he knew what it was and what it was there to do.
As it began to lower itself, Leland slowed the car from seventy-five miles per hour to somewhere closer to fifty.
“Listen carefully,” he said. “We’ve most likely been targeted by a laser designator by now. The hit will come any second, so we have to get out immediately. When you jump, aim for the shoulder and make sure to tuck and roll, then run for the forest and keep moving no matter what.”
“I’ll never make it to the forest.”
“Probably not. Remember, tuck and roll. One, two…”
At three, the car doors flew open, and Shawn and Leland leaped out, and not a moment too soon, as seconds later, a missile struck the car, exploding it right in the middle of the highway. Shawn hit the soft shoulder of the road hard, then, without taking stock of damage to his body or the disaster on the road, rolled to his side and, in the midst of billowing smoke, scrambled to his feet, and raced downhill toward the trees. To his surprise, no missiles or gunfire followed him.
When the smoke cleared, Leland was standing in the middle of the highway, not far from the burned-out car, holding his pistol in his right hand and staring down the drone, which now hovered some thirty feet in the air in front of him, framed by the darkening sky. Unlike Shawn, Leland had been forced to hit pavement, not dirt, so his outer clothes were torn to shreds. Otherwise, save a few scratches and road burns, he was unscathed.
From up close, Leland could see that the large hexacopter was a fairly standard military model, not unlike a quadcopter he’d done some aerodynamics research for during a brief and lucrative stint in military consulting in the mid-’00s. However, this aircraft had apparently been retrofitted to include two AGM-176 Griffin missiles, one of which had obviously already been spent, as well as some additional weaponry, though it was hard to identify exactly what.
What really interested Leland right now, though, was not its capabilities but its vulnerabilities. Just as with a manned helicopter, the only conceivable way to take this baby down with just a handgun would be to aim for its brain. In a case like this, though, where the computer was located in an encasement, to do so efficiently, he’d first have to be closer than thirty feet away; more like just a few inches.
But there were other concerns now, as Leland suddenly sensed the slightest presence of heat on his forehead. He could practically feel the series of coded pulses he knew were now being generated on his face. These signals would soon be bounced off into the sky to be detected by the second Griffin, which would then seek out the center of the reflected signal: his face.
In a matter of milliseconds, Leland ducked and dived behind the charred remains of the Honda Civic and heard—and felt—the second missile release from the drone and slam into the bombed-out car, further decimating its remains. The drone swiftly circled around the wreckage so that it was virtually on top of him, then pulled itself back for a better angle and unleashed a torrent of machine-gun fire at him, partially solving the riddle of what else it was armed with. That was okay; bullets he could deal with, and as he handily dodged most of the firepower (an exercise in pain avoidance more than life preservation), he smiled to think of the drone pilot, hunkered down somewhere in an Ambius control center, surely cursing himself right now for having just wasted both missiles.
When the drone dropped down several feet to get closer, possibly readying itself to unleash a new, more effective weapon, Leland suddenly, in a quick blur of successive movements, leaped from the ground to the top of the charred-out Civic and then, from there, deftly avoiding the propeller blades, straight onto the body of the aircraft itself.
The hexacopter spun around furiously and even tilted, something Leland hadn’t realized it could do because most multirotors can’t, but he held tight. With his left hand gripping one of the rotor masts for balance and his right still clutching the gun, Leland straddled the drone’s body with his legs and fired his weapon three times into the raised, glass encasement in its top center.
The drone continued to whirl and tilt, which meant Leland hadn’t destroyed the operating system. Amid the shattered glass of the destroyed encasement there was, among other pieces of machinery, a small gray box with thick yellow wires protruding from it. Maybe that was it. He fired at that, but still nothing happened. Though the camera would be below the copter’s body, the operating system should be right there. Not wanting to blow out everything and waste lead, he tried to search his memories from his early consulting days. He’d met with several engineers … had they ever shown him any diagrams? By now, multirotors would have gone through four or five evolutions, weaponry aside, but if he could recall the basic shape of the system, he could probably identify its technological descendant.
He didn’t get the
chance.
The drone pilot, wherever he or she was, had apparently made a calculated decision. A four-million-dollar hexacopter was ultimately worthless if it didn’t do its job. The mission came first, the hunk of metal second. With a sudden jerk, the drone lurched back, and then, with Leland still on top of it, rammed straight into the wreckage.
Shawn watched the subsequent explosion, the biggest yet, from the edge of the woods. When Leland had told him to run into the forest and keep moving, Shawn had assumed the drone would take him out before he ever made it to the trees. When that didn’t happen, he knew that he should take Leland’s advice and keep on running, not least because now was probably the best chance he’d ever get to ditch him. He would run into the woods and never look back.
But not just yet.
Back at the mansion when the bullet from that pistol had ricocheted off Leland’s chest and into Miles had been the moment Shawn knew he was done with Leland. But it had also been the moment when all the talk he’d heard from Rachel and Leland about intelligent alien life and cosmic shields and interplanetary intrigue had suddenly gone from science fiction to reality. Before, the whole business could have theoretically been some kind of elaborate fabrication. After all, he’d been shown no real proof for any of it. The only real evidence for aliens he had was what everyone had: the video footage from Bernasconi Hills. But in the fateful instant that Miles fired that gun, Shawn saw for himself, in person, with his own eyes, that Andrew Leland had been to space and come back something more than a man.
Now, the chance to see that new-and-improved Andrew Leland in full action mode was not one he could bring himself to miss. And watching from the edge of the woods, he hadn’t been disappointed as he witnessed the awesome sight of a human being ably facing off against a military drone, a man who looked like any other, but was dodging missiles and machine-gun fire—so much gunfire that some bullets must have hit him though you’d never know it—a man leaping onto a drone and, Jesus, appearing to fucking wrestle with it! Keep running no matter what? Thanks, but no thanks. It had been a sight unlike any he’d ever witnessed and one he knew he would never forget.
The Return Page 16