Is the risk here, or there?
There’s less difference between the two than you might think.
“No,” said Daniel. “We have to risk it. I’m gonna wake her.”
“You’re the boss. I’ll check our exit, you get her up and get dressed.”
Pat left the room and Daniel returned to the float tank. He opened the hatch, reaching inside to flip on the blue lights.
Dana Cameron lay floating.
Unmoving.
Facedown.
Daniel launched himself halfway into the tank, grabbing an ankle, a knee, pulling her closer, hooking one arm around her ribcage and hauling her through the hatch, tumbling to the floor beside her.
He scrambled to his feet against the weight of his waterlogged bathrobe, got hold of her legs and lifted high, until salt water flowed from her lungs, out her mouth, onto the floor.
He put her legs down and flipped her onto her back. She didn’t cough, didn’t gasp, didn’t move at all. Her eyes stared up at the ceiling, unblinking, seeing nothing.
Daniel blew four breaths into her lungs. Felt for a pulse.
No pulse.
Pat walked through the door as Daniel made a fist and pounded the Flash logo on Dana Cameron’s chest.
“Fuck me,” said Pat, dropping to his knees and taking over mouth-to-mouth as Daniel started CPR.
Pat paused every four breaths and felt for a pulse. And at some point, he just stopped. But Daniel didn’t stop until Pat reached out and touched his arm.
“The woman ain’t coming back, brother. I’m sorry. She’s a rag doll, zero muscle tension, been dead for some minutes. Probably before you even climbed out of your tank.”
Daniel leaned on one elbow and caught his breath, unable to look away from Cameron’s dead eyes. He’d barely known her, but he liked her. She’d been smart and funny and brave. Risked her life to save his, to guide him into Source. He felt like he’d lost a friend.
The wave of grief rolled over him, leaving behind a more selfish thought:
She had so much more to tell me.
And then the guilt.
He leaned forward and closed her eyelids.
Pat said, “We need a head start outta here. She’s gotta go back in. Get dressed.”
Daniel dropped the sopping bathrobe on the floor and climbed into his clothes, as Pat lifted Dana Cameron’s body, carried it over to the tank, and floated it, as gently as possible, faceup in the salt water.
Pat closed the hatch. “Ready?”
Daniel shoved his pistol in one pocket, cell phone in another, and nodded. He followed Pat out the door and into the reception area.
The bored young man at the counter looked up as they passed, and in one smooth motion, Pat raised a silenced pistol and pointed it straight at the white felt band of his Santa hat and—
Daniel grabbed the gun and pivoted, walking into Pat and raising his arm. They stood chest to chest, both holding the gun high.
Pat could’ve easily overpowered Daniel, but instead he said, “Well, this is awkward.”
“A little,” said Daniel.
“So . . . you gonna let me do my job?”
Daniel said, “Just . . . hold that thought.” He turned to face the young man, who stood frozen and trembling behind the counter.
He said, “You want to live, right?”
18
What the hell were you thinking?” barked Pat. He slowed and turned the corner onto one of Barcelona’s wide, tree-lined boulevards, then put on some speed, blending into the flow of traffic.
“I was thinking: Maybe let’s not shoot the innocent bystander. Have you lost your mind?”
“No.” Pat challenged Daniel with a sharp glare. “Have you?” He returned his eyes to the road, but he wasn’t done. “Soon as Pretty Boy frees himself, he’ll be describing us to the cops, and they’ll nab us trying to leave the country. Use your head. He’s the only thing that connects us with the professor’s body.”
Pat was right about that. Daniel would be on the university’s security footage, but they’d parked the car on a small side street—a dead zone a few blocks from campus. Cameron had left her office building ten minutes after Daniel, by a different exit. No traffic cameras on the float spa’s block, and no CCTV inside the spa.
But Pat was also wrong.
“Yes, he’s the only thing that connects us,” said Daniel. “Only, he isn’t a thing.”
“All wars include collateral damage,” said Pat.
A sense-memory washed over Daniel—the coppery taste of Kara’s blood filling his mouth as he breathed air into her punctured lung, his finger plugging the hole between her ribs—and with it came the overwhelming sense of helplessness, the despair, and the rage.
He forced the memory away. “I’m sick of collateral damage,” he said. “And ends justifying means is a slippery slope. I don’t like where it leads.”
“That’s pretty rich coming from a guy who committed premeditated murder a few months back.”
“Conrad Winter wasn’t innocent.”
“No shit, Sherlock. You did the world a favor. There is such a thing as a righteous murder. But I’ve been a soldier all my adult life, all over the world. What I’ve learned? Nobody’s fuckin’ innocent.”
Daniel waved it away. “That’s a cynical pose and you know it. Mercenary friend once told me, ‘Scratch any cynic, you find a wounded idealist underneath.’ Oh, right. It was you.”
Pat smiled, but it was a sad smile. “Not anymore, brother.” He lowered the window and lit a smoke. “Maybe I’ve just seen too much of the shit, I don’t know. Bottom line: Most people are just no damn good.”
“You think that kid deserved to die for having bad taste in hairstyles and working a part-time job in a float spa? Really?” Daniel pulled the burner phone from his pocket. “We’ll grab the next commuter flight to anywhere, be out of the country by the time he frees himself. I’m good at knots. And you know what else?” He flashed Pat the driver’s license he’d taken from the kid. “He’s convinced we’ll come find him and punch his ticket if he describes us accurately to the cops. So he’ll tell himself he doesn’t remember clearly, blame the stress, his memory will accidentally on purpose grow hazy, and he’ll misremember enough details that his description to the cops won’t look like us.”
“You hope,” said Pat.
Daniel turned and looked out the window. He said, “While we’re on the subject of collateral damage: Digger didn’t want to talk about Noah, and I pushed her until she relented. And then he found us. I got her killed.”
“Correlation does not imply causation,” said Pat.
“Oh, fuck off,” said Daniel.
“You fuck off,” said Pat. “You don’t know that’s why Noah found you. You said time moves a lot slower there. He had hours to notice you. Maybe you got her killed, maybe not, but you can’t know that. From where I’m sitting, your guilt looks a little like self-indulgence. And I say that with love. I know you’re going through a lot of weird mental shit, but you really gotta try and keep your head in the game.”
The next few miles out of the city passed in silence, Pat smoking and Daniel searching airline schedules on his burner phone. As they approached the highway, Pat tossed his cigarette butt and raised the window. He said, “You gonna tell me what happened, or I gotta ask?”
Daniel said, “Let’s stipulate up front: It sounds crazy. I know it sounds crazy, so that’s not the kind of feedback I’m looking for.”
“Scout’s honor,” said Pat.
“Okay. She was right—it’s not a vision, it’s a place. The people who can cross over from here to there call it Source.”
“A place where? Like a parallel universe?”
“Maybe. I don’t know, and I don’t want to get into metaphors. Nobody there really knows what it is, though most think they do. They’ve been seduced into believing that Source is the only reality”—he gestured to the Spanish countryside all around—“and this is just a dream.”
“Some dream,” said Pat.
Then Daniel told Pat the rest, everything Dana Cameron had told him, all he had seen and done in Source, the hyper-real textures and tastes, the ability to manifest things from nothing, to spot-travel from one place to another.
When Daniel finished, Pat said, “Tell you what, if this Noah character wants to make Earth a better dream, he can be my guest.”
“Dude. He rules Source with an iron fist, makes agitators disappear—look what he did to the professor, just because she showed me a different perspective. That’s not how you make the dream better.”
Pat shrugged. “Depends on how great he thinks the better dream can be. You know that cliché about omelets and eggs. Maybe he looks around at the shitty dream we got, and he decides the ends really do justify the means.”
Daniel said, “First of all, Earth is not a dream.” The ghost of an ice cube slid down his spine as he said it. “Although I gotta admit, Source feels every bit as real as this place. More real, to be honest.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” said Pat. “I’ve always suspected we’re livin’ in a kind of dream, ever since I was a kid.”
They rode in silence for a minute.
Daniel said, “When I was nine years old, Tim quit the tent revival circuit for the summer and we stayed put in New Orleans. He got me a dog at the SPCA on Japonica Street, and he insisted on naming it Judas. He thought that was hilarious. We were walking in Audubon Park—it was over a hundred degrees out and Judas was straining at his leash, wanted to cool off in the big water fountain. Tim let him off the leash and he ran ahead, maybe a hundred yards, jumped in the fountain. And I stood there, watching him splash around, and I thought, I can see the fountain from here. I can close my eyes, and in my mind I can be standing right there at the fountain, patting Judas, and I know what wet dog feels like. I can put my mind there, so why can’t I just put my body there, too?”
“Ha! You wanted to spot-travel.”
“Exactly. And this thought—this feeling that if you can see a place, you should just be able to be there—stayed with me for, I don’t know, ten years maybe. Practically every time I walked somewhere, I had it again. Some time in my late teens, it just went away, and I forgot all about it. Until just this minute.”
Pat said, “Maybe the professor was right. Maybe part of your consciousness was in Source all along, and you just brought that desire to spot-travel into the dream.”
“Except this isn’t a dream. Parallel reality maybe, but not a dream. I can’t believe that.”
“Why not?”
“Because believing Earth is a dream means the people around you aren’t real, they’re just characters in your dream. And that leads to solipsism, and solipsist is just a fancy word for sociopath. It’s a philosophy that denies other people their free will, destroys empathy.”
Pat laughed. “Don’t you keep up on science? There ain’t no such thing as free will. They proved it, hooked folks up to brain scans. Know what they found? We make choices so fast we ain’t even making them. Show someone two options, and boom”—he snapped his fingers—“choice is made. Then, afterwards, we go through the process of rationalizing, pretending we’re carefully considering our options and being smart. Truth is, choice was made before we even knew there was a choice in front of us. Free will is an illusion, man.”
Daniel thought about that. He said, “There was a famous rabbi, I don’t remember his name, who said, ‘I don’t believe in God because there is one, I believe in God because there should be.’ I guess that’s how I feel about free will.”
“Fine. You go on, keep your head in the sand, but it ain’t just science that proves me right. It’s also experience. I look around, and I see the world populated by robots and zombies, every last one of us. And our need to think we got free will makes us easy to manipulate. All you gotta do is create a painful situation, then offer an escape from the pain. Make it a binary choice, people will take the easy way out. They’ll go where you want them to go, do what you want them to do, every damn time. And the best part? You make them work for it, just a bit, and they’ll be absolutely convinced they chose that path of their own free will.”
“You must be a hell of a lot of fun at parties,” said Daniel.
“All I’m saying is, human beings are hardwired all wrong. We’re doomed by our DNA, destined to treat each other like shit. If a giant alien spaceship entered our atmosphere tomorrow morning and a booming voice said, ‘We have crossed a vast distance from planet Don’t Be An Asshole, and we will now vaporize planet Earth if you don’t stop being assholes to each other,’ we couldn’t do it. We wouldn’t last an hour.”
“We’re not fallen angels, Pat. We’re risen apes. Human history is written in blood, but we’re getting better.”
“Not better enough.”
Daniel said, “You say most people are no damn good, but I know you know better. The real bad guys are a small minority—”
“And you know why that doesn’t matter?” said Pat.
“Oh, here we go,” Daniel sighed.
“Because the so-called good guys won’t do what it takes to win, won’t allow the ends to justify the means. They gotta preserve their sense of moral purity, so they put limits on their behavior and always end up losing to the bad guys, who have no problem doing whatever it takes to win.”
“It’s not about moral purity,” said Daniel. “It’s about not becoming what you’re fighting against.”
“Oh boo-fucking-hoo. Life sucks and then you die.” Pat sent Daniel a grin. “And before you start to think I’m fixin’ to throw myself off a tall building, I will now share with you the good news.”
“If you hand me a Watchtower, we are not friends anymore.”
Pat laughed. “Nah, the good news is—okay, I’m sure Raoul’s head would explode if he knew I was sharin’ this, but I think you need to know: AIT has passed the 500,000 mark. Spreading so fast it’ll be a million before the ball drops on Times Square.”
“Holy shit.”
“You said it.”
“And how is this good news?”
“You know, maybe AIT represents some kinda jump in human evolution. Maybe it’ll fix what’s broken in our DNA and we’ll all end up holdin’ hands, singing ‘Kumbaya.’”
Then Pat started singing.
“Okay, now you’re just messin’.”
Pat howled with laughter. “Gotta keep your sense of humor intact.”
They rolled on in silence for a few miles.
Then Pat said, “You really think this Noah can find you here, with his mind?”
“He can build a four-hundred-story skyscraper with his mind, I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet he can find me here if he tries. He knows where everyone in Source lives on Earth, knows details about their lives. And no one tested my legend before Drapeau came for me in Barbados. I’m guessing Noah told him where to find me.”
“Damn, son. That’s not good.”
“It is precisely double-plus ungood,” said Daniel.
“So what’s the plan?”
Daniel looked at his watch and let out a long breath. He leaned back against the headrest with his eyes closed, trying not to see Dana Cameron’s dead body sprawled on the floor of the float spa. He rubbed his temples, taking deep decompression breaths. He’d been back almost two hours, but he didn’t quite feel present, almost like he’d left part of himself in Source.
Yet another absurdity that simply felt true.
Wait. Is that the taste of cinnamon?
He opened his eyes. Pat sat behind the wheel, chewing gum.
“Is that cinnamon flavored?”
Pat stopped chewing. “Oh, shit. Sorry, I didn’t think.” He cracked the window and tossed the gum out. “Won’t happen again.”
“Yeah, better if it didn’t,” said Daniel. “Having enough trouble hanging onto reality . . . whatever the hell reality is.” He took another deep breath, refocusing on practical matters.
After a minute,
he said, “Okay, I’ve got the plan. Remember what you said about the relative merits of mobility and battlements?”
“Yup.”
“The plan is to keep moving until we think of a plan.”
19
So they kept moving. A nonstop flight to Paris on Air France, followed by a CityJet flight to London, then changing planes for a connecting flight to Antwerp.
In every departure lounge, television screens played scenes of angry public protests spreading around the world, and huge displays of The Truth (So Far) about Trinity stood at the entrance of every airport bookstore and sundry shop, and everywhere Daniel looked, he saw posters advertising the book.
The posters featured the headline READ THE BOOK THAT’s CHANGING THE WORLD, above a photo of the book and a larger picture of Julia, smiling into the camera lens.
Daniel was struck by how little Poster-Julia looked like herself, the smile lines beside her eyes and the frown line in the middle of her forehead all Photoshopped out of existence. Clearly, her publisher’s advertising department believed the book that’s changing the world should’ve been written by a younger version of Julia.
Nice priorities, thought Daniel.
In Antwerp, Pat and Daniel used new passports to rent a Mercedes sedan, and then hit the highway, driving an hour south through the black Belgian night.
It was just after two a.m. when they stopped in downtown Brussels, at La Porte Noire, an old basement cellar bar with vaulted brick ceilings, over a hundred different beers, and live music by a band called the Narcotic Daffodils.
The music was good, the cheese plate and beer absolutely necessary. On the run since midday yesterday—five cities in four countries in fourteen hours—Daniel was running ragged. And tomorrow they’d fly to Dusseldorf, rent another car and head north, changing passports again for the border, and drop that car in Amsterdam. Then fly to . . . hell, might as well fly to the moon.
“This is not a sustainable plan,” Daniel said. “I have to cross over.”
“What?”
“I have to go back to Source.”
The Savior's Game (The Daniel Byrne Trilogy Book 3) Page 11