by James, Mark
A vital capillary in his brain ruptured with the first strike. The next five were redundant.
Their purpose was to singe another pattern, to engage a vendetta.
As the weapon found its final arterial pathway, Dan saw a light, a star. He had dabbled in life’s meanings when he was younger, but had never believed in reincarnation, or the afterlife, or any of that crazy stuff. The books on metaphysics, those late nights reading about cosmology and chaos theory, it had all been a college phase, nothing more. Like most, he then moved on into his career and family and found no need to search further. He believed that life’s meaning was to be found there, in that life. He didn’t need to know the unknowable.
He could feel himself float down an expansive corridor – darkness all around, yet not as a void – moving towards the star. Closer, he reached out, the light of his finger touching the light of the star.
And then he knew.
†
They rummaged through the grocery bag that former FBI Special Agent Fitzgerald had left for them, through the same cans Fitzgerald had rummaged from his own bachelor shelves. They eventually settled on spaghetti and rolls, crisped under the broiler. Afterwards, they cleaned up, learning to negotiate in the small space and continuing to feign normalcy, telling each other their old stories.
“Italy, four times? When was the last?”
Moving into the living room, he set his coffee on the side table between them.
A cold front had moved in and the winds were picking up, finding each seam in the aging cottage. He reached for the fireplace poker and gave the logs another push, scattering sparks.
“Here’s your tea,” he said. “Italy, the last trip, let’s see…I was about twenty-eight. I went to the wedding of a friend of a friend – always a good excuse for a trip, right? We stayed in a small town about forty minutes outside of Rome, Roma. It was an old hotel, but with tons of character: perched on a medieval street corner, trellises in the back and the gardens filled with flowers, then a great Sunday morning brunch.”
“Anyway, the woman who was getting married was a contessa, tracing her ancestors back to a Pope in the eleventh century. The reception was held at a winery owned by the groom’s family, high on a hill, the vineyards falling away on all sides. I remember that the house even had a turret still standing from the seventh century. The reception was at night and they’d placed a lantern under each vine, the lights rolling away for as far as you could see. And earlier that day, the wedding had been held at a small church that was perched at the edge of this extinct volcano, a caldera. And, get this, the bride’s family was so politically tight with the Vatican that the Pope supplied his own choir. Only about twenty singers, but they sounded like a hundred. The acoustics in the church, it made time stand still.”
He looked up. She was smiling at him, lost in his story.
“Anyway,” he said, “it was a great time. Good memories. How about you? How about another one of yours?”
“Hmm, let me think,” she said, snuggling back into the chair and pulling up the throw. “I was about the same age, twenty-five or so. I was on Oahu visiting a friend and wanted to try a shot at surfing pipeline. I borrowed a board from a friend of a friend – same story – and went down to the beach towards evening. The waves weren’t terribly high, so no one was really out, maybe a few tourists standing up on the road taking pictures. I surfed a few waves and was about to come in when I saw a shadow, then a fin about ten feet away. I was heading in, feeling pretty safe, when I felt this sharp pain across my calf. I looked down and there was a slice about a quarter inch deep and twelve inches long, bleeding like crazy. I made it to shore and was taken to the hospital – forty stitches. It took it three months to heal. A shark expert later told me that it had probably only glanced by, whipping its tail and catching my leg. Their skin is like sandpaper. Anyway, it spooked me good.”
“But you went back in?”
“I had too. Otherwise, it would have won. Not the shark, the experience. The darkness of it.”
He smiled, “Come on, let’s see.”
She laughed, pulling the throw up higher, “What, you don’t believe me?”
He leaned forward. “Come on, let’s have it.”
She slowly pulled the throw from her left leg. Across the outside was a long, faded scar.
“Unbelievable,” he said, leaning back, “that’s a great story. And, it sure explains why I generally stay out of the water.”
“What are you talking about? I remember you surfing during all of those summers.”
“Yeah, but not that much.”
“Why did you come to the islands, then?”
“It’s the land: hiking the jungle mountains, the Na Pali trails, the richness of it all. I like the feel of solid earth under my feet. Out there, on the ocean, it’s a beautiful thing, no doubt, but I’d rather be on the mountain.”
“Wherever a person gets their awe, huh?”
“You know, sometimes, when I’m up there and there’s no one around, well, it’s just right.”
“You know, hearing you say it, that’s why I had to get back into the ocean. Same thing, really.”
They looked down for a moment, lost in the memories. On the mountain or out at sea, they’d momentarily forgotten where they were. His cell phone buzzed.
“Hey Mac, what’s up?”
Jack stood and moved towards the fireplace. She couldn’t hear what Mac was saying on the other end, but he seemed to go on forever.
“Alright,” Jack finally said. “We’ll be ready. And thanks for the help outside. Sure…okay, we’ll see you tomorrow.”
And then he became serious, “What?”
There was something wrong.
“They did what?” The furrow between Jack’s eyes deepened as he imagined Aisha being waterboarded. “Is she alright?”
“About as well as can be expected,” Mac said. “Psychologically, she’s closed up pretty tight.”
“Obviously, there’s nothing I can do from here,” Jack said. “Tell her I’m safe and I’ll be back soon. She’ll need to know that.”
Jack had never mentioned anything to Lani about a woman in his life. Listening in as he spoke, about another woman he obviously cared for, it caught her somehow.
“Okay, Mac, we’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
He hung up and began walking back.
“Is everything alright?” she asked.
He sat next to her, leaning closer. “No worries. Fitzgerald and Cal Stevens are outside and Mac has brought in five others, all heavily armed, so someone would have to punch pretty hard to get in here. I think we’re safe for tonight. Tomorrow morning, Mac will brief us on our next move. He’s putting it together. And he said he had some toys for us. Not sure what he meant, but I hope it means a very large weapon for Jack.”
She felt an urge to ask him about the end of his conversation.
“Anything else? You just seemed a bit upset at the end there.”
“No, everything is fine.”
“Well,” he smiled, “about as good as one can be, right?”
She smiled back, but he could see her doubts. Lani knew how these things usually went.
“It’ll be fine, Lani. We just need to use our experience and keep it together. For some reason, I have a strong feeling on that. If we stay close and have faith in ourselves, we’ll get through this.”
“Another hunch?”
He smiled, “You bet.”
“Is that how you won all those trials? That’s what Mac said, that you never lost.”
“Well, he’s off there. I did lose one early on.”
He took her hand, “Right now, there’s only you and me. Sure, we have Mac backing us up, along with the president, but in the end it’ll be up to us. Something keeps telling me that.”
The silence of the old cottage returned, as if it was the house’s true nature. He leaned back, stretching. “It’s getting late. We have a lot to do tomorrow.”
She gat
hered the throw and walked towards the stairs and the attic bedroom. He watched her slowly climb the stairs, her cotton socks silent on the polished wood.
She turned, “Thanks, Jack. I’m not sure why – just being here.”
He nodded, “You need anything? You took a water up earlier, right?”
“I’m fine…good night.”
He returned to the chair and pulled the handgun from the holster lying next to him. He placed it in his lap, under the blanket. The fire was beginning to die, only embers now.
He watched the crackling, the embers nearly humming and as he fell fast asleep, pulled towards the dream.
17
Composed of five concentric rings, each bisected by ten adjoining corridors, the Pentagon is larger than three Empire State Buildings combined. Despite its 17.5 miles of corridors, it only takes seven minutes for any of its 24,000 inhabitants to walk from one location to another.
Mac entered at the metro entrance, recently redesigned with the added security of the Surveillance-Net technology and limited to VIP entrants. He looked up to the black, orb-like cameras tucked into an upper corner and knew that a “computer brain” was scanning every contour of his face, analyzing his gait, looking at the color of his teeth.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he said to the two Marines standing stiff as rods. “Good morning, sir,” they replied in unison and said nothing more for the next seven minutes as they escorted him to the most secure section of the building.
He approached the elevator, placed his finger on the pad and felt the prick as a microscopic needle excised still more of his blood. He found it disquieting that in a world where computers could track every person on the planet, he was still being subjected to this anachronism. His father had been a diabetic for years and the osmotic testers had been marketed even longer, so why this archaic contraption? Every six months or so he brought it up at a DOD briefing, “Okay Josh, then why don’t we just start drilling holes into our heads to release the evil spirits? Because, you know – and you can bet on this – in a thousand years they’ll look back on this bloodletting and be saying the same thing. Hey, maybe we should etch your name on each of the needle modules, so in that same thousand years, when those future archaeological teams unearth them, they’ll know exactly who to blame in their museum exhibits? Hey, Josh, you’ll finally be famous!”
Mac and Josh had dinner together every other weekend and, next to Jack and the president, Josh was his other best friend. At the DOD briefings, and after letting Mac have his ritual vent, Rendel would always hang his head, “Come on, Mac, we’ve been through this crap a thousand times…”
Mac hated needles, his recoil stemming from having once been captured in Morocco and subjected to twelve injections of “truth serum.” Following an unforeseen coup, a mob of desert jihadists, the Maghrebis, had mistakenly raided a joint CIA/FBI training compound. Mac and two other senior agents had been the only ones left in the camp as they waited for the last helicopter transport to arrive when the Moroccan coup erupted. The NSA later estimated from satellite imagery that the compound had been overrun by over three hundred Maghrebis marching to the capital, Rabat. The Maghrebis had only possessed a tattered box of some liquid from years before that the Russians had once used on them and couldn’t resist trying it. After the second needle, Mac determined that the serum had lost its effectiveness, but he and the other agents continued to feign hallucinations while feeding the coup leaders false information. The helicopter didn’t arrive until after the twelfth needle.
Mac Osborne hated needles…
Rendel met him in the corridor, coming out of the lab entrance. “Hey Mac, bad traffic?”
“You don’t know? What Josh, spend another lonely night in the lab?”
Josh laughed, “You’re one to talk. I called your house last weekend and Jacquie has no idea where you’re at, zippo. Of course, I consoled her – wonderful woman, Jacquie.”
“Thanks, ole friend,” Mac smiled.
“Alright,” he continued, “first things first: what’s our status on breaking the encryption on the Croatian account routing?”
“Still crunching along. It’s quite unique, as if it’s based on nonlinear operations. No idea on who did it. And I know everyone, except for a few unknowns in Beijing and Moscow. Apart from two people here in the lab, the only other program designers capable of this encryption design execution are two disavowed operatives. One was yours at the NSA, before you took over.”
“Get me the files on the disavowed. We’ll need to start working that if, in fact, they’re behind the encryption. They could lead us to a source. And one more thing: I want you, Josh – not someone else – to go at this one hundred percent. I know that the guys in your lab are world class, but they’re still not you. It’s important.”
“What about the other projects?”
“This is very important to the president.”
Mac didn’t say that often and Josh knew what it meant. “Understood.”
They entered the enormous lab, the “Super Bowl of Science,” as Mac was apt to jab Josh at the bar if Josh started rambling on about something too boringly technical.
Josh walked over to the nearest table. It was bare except for three squares, each the size of a thin magazine and dark like gunmetal.
“What are these?” Mac asked.
“Go ahead?”
Mac looked over.
“Don’t worry, you won’t be electrocuted. Touch the top.”
Mac put his finger on the metal – which felt more like soft rubber – and the front activated into a computer screen, the most realistic he’d ever seen. The picture was of Mac at his birthday party three years ago, about to eat cake with his mouth wide open and that, obviously, Josh had taken surreptitiously.
Mac smiled, shaking his head.
He looked closer at the pad image. “It’s very cool, though. What is it? It has to be more than a nice picture.”
“It is. Do you remember Project Eos, from about three years ago? We had that parallel computing problem – couldn’t get the computer modules to line up operationally with the nano-carbon? Well, we solved it.”
“Refresh my memory. Something to do with emergency communications scenarios, right?”
“Correct. Project Eos provides emergency communication devices that can operate after nuclear detonations, or after a coordinated cyber attack, and that, essentially, operate off-grid. Meaning that the devices can talk to each other without others listening in. Go ahead, touch the top right corner. It only reacts to human skin; each unit tuned to a specific surface buoyancy in the stimulus. Right there.”
Josh beamed with pride as Mac touched the pad and a wafer-thin keyboard ejected from inside the device.
“Cool again,” Mac said. “What else? To be honest, the keyboard is so thin it looks like it could snap right off.”
“Titanium and carbon nano-tube impregnated – impossible to break. You could use it as a springboard and it wouldn’t matter. Basically, the units were developed so that the top twenty administration officials could communicate with each other after the electro-magnetic pulse of a nuclear detonation, or a massive cyber attack, had disabled normal communications, from which these laptops are immune. They can also tap into the trans-oceanic communications buoys used by our nuclear submarines and hijack cell towers, domestic and international, all untraceable.”
“So, an obvious question. Why don’t we use them for everyone – military, covert, everyone?”
“The programming would be deciphered by our enemies in what we estimate to be two to three months. So, if we want a watertight post emergency device, we have to forego widespread distribution.”
“Why only three here? You said twenty.”
“These are prototypes.”
Mac gathered up two of the pads and tucked them under his arm, “Instruction manuals?”
“Self-explanatory. They work like any other laptop. The magic is on the inside.”
Mac started t
owards the door, then paused and turned, “Hey, why Project Eos, wasn’t that the Greek goddess of the dawn, or something like that?”
“Yes, the Project Eos communication devices are a new dawn in the field of computer laptops. We’re extremely excited about it. I and some of the others in the lab, well, we felt that the name was appropriate.”
Mac’s idea of a computer laptop was that it was no more than a glorified typewriter hooked up to a snazzy TV screen, all tapped into the neighborhood library. No doubt, eminently convenient, but nowhere near the Gutenberg press in evolutionary importance. Besides, if you didn’t go to the library before computers, what would make you go and look for a book just because it was now in a shiny new box? Jack felt much the same and this fact, Mac was certain, was simply one more reason why they got along so well.
He looked over his brow at Josh, “A new dawn? You’re not geeking out on me again, are you, Josh?”
“Don’t lose them,” Josh said jokingly and completely serious.
“Well, I have to admit to a small fib earlier. They’re not for me,” Mac said, smiling as he walked away.
Josh’s mouth dropped open.
Passing through the door, Mac laughed back, “Now that’s funny!”
†
Garneau sat quietly in the office of Director-General Chastain. He never grew tired of the photos adorning Pierre-Louis’s walls: a black-and-white of Chastain laughing with the CIA Director at a reception, another walking seriously with the Russian premier, another at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. There were perhaps a hundred. Garneau loved the pageantry it all, its history.
Chastain flew into the office, whipping off his overcoat, “Hello, hello, Henri! Sorry I’m late – again!”
His cheeks were rosy from the wind. “First we had that freakish snow and now this! Simply awful, lost my hat twice…”