by Ward Larsen
“Maybe he’ll do the job for us,” the driver said, only half in jest.
The car disappeared from sight around the curve.
“Call it off!” the commander ordered.
The driver pulled smoothly to the gravel and grass shoulder. For a time there was silence, only the weary rumble of the Tahoe’s overstressed V8 and the rub of shifting bodies on leather upholstery.
“What could we have done?” said the man with the Taser. “It wasn’t practical to tag all the cars in the lot with transmitters. We watched him from the minute he went in—he never went to another table, never talked to anybody.” And there it was, they all knew—in a few unconvincing sentences, the after-action report of a failed mission. “How the hell did he get the keys?”
The driver said, “I lost sight of him when he went in back. Maybe it was the cook’s car.”
They all looked at him dumbly. Fry cooks didn’t drive new top-end Cadillacs.
The commander slammed his palm against the door in frustration. “This guy is smart,” he said. “We didn’t give him enough credit.”
“And he’s lucky,” said the man with the Taser.
The commander thought about it. “Maybe … but something about this bugs me. There’s something we’re not seeing.”
The Toyota caught up and pulled smoothly into formation behind them.
“Where to?” said the Tahoe’s driver.
“Not much choice. Back to square one.”
“The field of play just got a lot bigger.”
“I know,” said the commander. “Which means we’re going to need some help.”
* * *
DeBolt didn’t let his foot off the gas for nearly ten minutes. He saw no sign of the Tahoe behind him, and after a series of turns he slowed to nearly the speed limit on an empty rural road. The car seemed to relax, acquiring a spongy ride and a more civilized tone from the engine.
He looked at the dash-mounted GPS navigation display, which showed his position on a map in bright LEDs. Feeling cocky, he tried for his own personal map, thinking, Map, present position.
Nothing happened.
He tried again, still got nothing. He input the Cadillac’s license plate number, and then concentrated intently on the menu for Roy’s Diner.
No information arrived.
On a straightaway he closed his left eye and saw the blind spot—it was every bit as empty as when he’d first noticed it. What was he doing wrong? He felt a tremor of unease, which seemed absurd—having recognized his new talent barely an hour ago, he could hardly have become reliant on it. He felt as if his mind were under attack, some kind of cognitive Pearl Harbor. DeBolt felt confused, paranoid. He checked the mirror for the hundredth time.
Ten miles later he was sure he was in the clear. All the same, his death grip on the wheel was unrelenting. He felt an overwhelming urge to get out of sight, to stop and assert control over the anarchy in his head.
He veered onto what looked like a logging road, a barely groomed dirt and gravel path, and began churning up an incline—something between a large hill and a minor mountain. When the road deteriorated and he could go no farther, DeBolt put the car in park and instinctively reached for an ignition switch that was empty of any key or electronic fob. He closed his eyes. Was there even a way to turn the car off? The gas gauge showed half a tank, but every ounce of fuel spent idling cut the distance he could put between himself and Cape Split. Where was he even going? What was the use of running without a destination in mind?
He got out of the idling car.
He’d been in the driver’s seat no more than thirty minutes, but it felt good to move and stretch. He breathed in the cool, evergreen-scented air. DeBolt left the car where it was and hiked to the top of the hill, the softly rumbling engine heavy in the background, a gasoline-driven stopwatch to remind him that time equated to distance. After a three-minute trek over God’s hardscape, hidden in the shadows of stunted pines and leafless maples, he crested the hill and looked out across a bucolic scene. The engine noise had faded, and the stillness before him was stark—surely made more so by the events of the last day. He saw a small town perhaps a mile away, a second at the base of a sister mountain in the distance.
He wondered idly what the name of the town was, and to his surprise the answer was immediately furnished:
BAILEYVILLE, MAINE
DeBolt’s head drooped in disbelief. What the hell?
He rubbed the back of his neck and looked up at a faultless midday sky. He had the beginnings of a headache. For most people a mere annoyance, but for him … what? A concern? A system malfunction? DeBolt found himself in a new and unimaginable realm. In the Coast Guard, when he’d encountered difficult situations he had always had his training to fall back on. But how could anyone prepare for something like this?
On a hill adjacent to the town he noticed a small antennae farm. Is that the answer? he wondered. Do I need a connection of some kind, a cell tower or a Wi-Fi portal? Are there mobile circuits wired inside my head? As incredible as it sounded, DeBolt knew there had to be at least a grain of truth in the idea. Somehow he was gathering information, linking to a network. He shuddered to imagine the long-term health consequences of such a transformation. But then, “long-term” had little place in his recent thinking.
The concept was as unnerving as it was frightening. I can find out anything. But how much does anybody really want to know?
Whatever this new faculty was, whatever he was, he had to learn its functionality, understand how it operated and what limitations existed. DeBolt decided he could test the antenna theory simply enough when he began driving again. The greater question, however, remained moored in the back of his mind. “Now what?” he said to no one. “Where do I go?”
He began with the most simple of inquiries: Trey Adam DeBolt.
After a considerable delay, he saw:
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS
DeBolt expelled a sharp breath, part laugh and part exasperation. “You can’t be serious…”
He sank to his haunches, sat back on a rocky ledge. It would be comical were it not so demoralizing. Sam the waitress, a cook named Rusty, and Dave who owned Roy’s—he could get information on anyone in the world. Anyone except himself.
He wished desperately that he could talk to Joan. She had asked him if he’d had any unusual sensations, and promised to explain everything soon. Joan had known. She understood what had been done to him. Perhaps she’d even been part of it. After considerable reflection, he realized this was where he had to begin. The best way to find out what had been done to him? Find out where Joan had worked. Find the hospital where it had begun, the place that floated through his mind like a fractured dream.
There was little to go on. He remembered everything before the accident, before the rescue mission that had killed his crew and put him on the brink. Call sign—Neptune 11. But that was where his past ended. Since that day he had known only Joan Chandler and a cottage on the shores of Maine. Now five men were hunting him. DeBolt feared those men, but—in a response he’d never before had—he hated them even more. Then something else came to mind. Words he’d seen scrawled on his medical file: META Project, Option Bravo. What did they mean?
He was desperate for answers.
But how? How do I find them?
A soft uphill gust brought the murmur of the Cadillac’s engine—the clock was running. No longer a stopwatch, but an alarm. It was time to go. Time to learn what he had become.
14
Lund was at her desk talking on the phone, an unrequited stack of papers pushed to one side. It wasn’t much of a conversation.
“Permian Air Ambulance,” she repeated.
“Don’t know. Don’t know that one,” said the woman, who sounded distinctly Asian. She assured Lund for a second time that she ran a dry-cleaning service in Fresno, not an air ambulance company.
“All right, thanks anyway,” said Lund.
“We run half-off special Wednesdays,” said the woman.
“You come in, bring your—”
Lund clicked off. She double-checked the number, and saw she’d dialed it correctly. She had found the phone number for Permian Air Ambulance in the air station flight logs. It was right there on the flight plan: the operator of the jet and contact information. On the night in question, N381TT, a Learjet 35, had collected Trey DeBolt and airlifted him to Anchorage International.
Only it hadn’t.
She was trapped in a classic backpedal. Her first calls had been to the Air Force hospital at Elmendorf and the Anchorage VA hospital, but neither had any record of a patient named Trey DeBolt. She tried all spelling variants of the name, and even asked record-keepers at both facilities go through the admission logs for the date in question, plus or minus one day. Still nothing. So Lund had tracked down information on the med-evac flight, hoping the company that ran it could shed light on where DeBolt had ended up. Now that appeared to be a dead end. Fresno, for God’s sake. It could have been a mistake, a pilot inputting a phone number that was off by one digit. Or … it could have been an intentional error.
She went to her computer and performed a search on Permian Air Ambulance. Lund found no such company. She decided to go back one more step—an inquiry she knew would at least get honest results. It took two calls to find the right number, and on the third ring Matt Doran, EMT, picked up.
“Hi, Matt, it’s Shannon Lund.”
“Hey, Shannon.” Doran sounded sleepy.
“Did I get you at a bad time?”
“No, I’m good. Just got off a twenty-four–hour shift, but it was a quiet night. You make any headway on that climbing accident?”
“Yeah, it’s coming along. But I was calling about something else. You mentioned that you helped transport Trey DeBolt to a med-evac jet a few weeks back.”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Well, do you remember anything else? Did the crew actually say they were going to Anchorage?”
“I never saw the pilots. There was a doctor and a nurse in back, but they were pretty busy prepping Trey for the flight.”
“A doctor … like an MD? Isn’t that unusual on a med-evac?”
“Yeah, I guess it is. I only talked to the nurse, and that was how she referred to him—‘the doctor.’ She did mention Anchorage, come to think of it—said they were going to perform surgery there, something about relieving the pressure on his brain.”
“Do you remember their names?”
“I don’t think I ever heard his. Her first name was Joan or Jean, something like that.”
“What did they look like?”
“The nurse was maybe mid-forties, average build, a little round at the edges. Brown hair cut short—kind of frumpy, I guess you could say.”
Me in fifteen years, Lund thought. “What about the doctor?”
“Had to be sixty, hair going silver, frameless glasses. I don’t remember much else. He seemed real busy, focused on Trey.”
She pumped him for a few more minutes, but got nothing notable. After hanging up, Lund sat back in her chair. She wondered who had searched DeBolt’s apartment and why. Wondered where besides Anchorage he had been taken in a private jet. When Doran had asked her about the climbing accident, she realized she’d been neglecting that case. Not that there was a case—the death of William Simmons was cut-and-dry compared to the klaxons going off around Trey DeBolt’s disappearance.
She pulled open her desk drawer and retrieved a bottle of pills, a ten-week regimen of iron supplements the doctor had insisted she take. She took it most days, but the bottle was more full than it should have been. She decided to go outside for a cigarette.
At the second-floor landing she waited for the elevator. On the wall next to her was a full-length mirror, and above it a sign that read: WEAR THE UNIFORM PROUDLY. Every building on station had a mirror like it, credit to an old commander, twice replaced, who apparently thought his troops weren’t looking snappy enough. There was a dress code, of course, for civilian employees of the service. Lund had been issued a copy when she’d first arrived, and while she reckoned it had probably changed over the years, nothing in her closet was going to raise anyone’s hackles. In truth, her wardrobe was so consistent it was practically a uniform in its own right: plain pants, loose-fitting shirt, therapeutic shoes. There were a few colors among the earth tones, none particularly bright, and not a single dress that she could remember. As she stood looking in the mirror, she realized her pageboy was overdue for a trim.
Lund sighed. She’d become a shadow of what she might be. Worse yet, she didn’t much care. Is that wrong? she asked herself. Before an answer came, the elevator rumbled to a stop and the door opened, interrupting her little sulk.
Lund turned away, opted for the stairs, and soon was outside walking into a chill fall breeze.
* * *
He had an incredible new gift.
People were trying to kill him.
Which seemed rather redundant, since he was officially dead.
That was the sorry state of PO2 Trey DeBolt’s life as he drove north toward Calais. It was a small township nestled between Canada and the Bay of Fundy. He had never been there before, but he’d heard of the bay, which was famous for its extreme tidal surges. DeBolt held the Caddy to the speed limit, but tensed all the same when a state trooper passed in the opposite direction—it was, after all, a stolen car. The trooper kept going.
He felt a compulsion to experiment with his abilities, and he wasn’t surprised to learn that there were indeed limitations. In certain rural stretches he drew blanks, but now, nearing Calais, all the world’s information was once again there for the asking. Some of it was downright disturbing. He passed a tanker truck carrying a load of hazardous material. Within a minute DeBolt knew that the placarded warning diamond signified the eighteen-wheeler was full of ammonium nitrate—with a reactivity hazard rating of three, a load that was extremely combustible under shock. The truck was destined for a fertilizer manufacturer in Presque Isle.
He also made mistakes. When he tried for information on Calais, DeBolt wound up on the seaside in France. It was just like any computer—garbage in, garbage out. A mile farther on, stopping at a red light, he pulled next to a small Audi whose female driver, a very attractive blonde, glanced his way and locked eyes for a moment. But only for a moment. He began with the license plate number, and by the time they reached the next light he knew her name: Christina Fontaine. He also knew that she was a recent graduate of Brown, cum laude, newly employed by a local accounting firm, and quite active in various green-leaning movements. She was single, active on at least one online dating service, and had $6,503.26 in her Bank of America Preferred Awards account.
What some guys would give for this, he thought.
It was like being a voyeur, peeking into the lives of others at will. It was also profoundly distressing. The internet offered information to everyone, but only to a point. DeBolt’s new faculties went far beyond that. It was more akin being a hacker, he imagined, only without the days and nights spent cracking passwords, and without constantly looking over one’s electronic shoulder for a cyber-crimes task force. As far as he could tell, he’d somehow acquired a pass—unlimited access without the attribution or headaches. At least not the metaphorical kind.
There were noticeable quirks to whatever network had found him. Most obvious—the length of time for responses varied. Some information came almost immediately, while other inquiries took minutes to fulfill. He was not surprised that Christina Fontaine’s bank balance had been particularly slow in coming—in truth, he was heartened. His secret server had worked overtime for that one. He watched her pull away from the stoplight in a flourish of blond hair and gleaming metallic paint. As she did so, that final thought remained lodged in DeBolt’s head. A bank account. Everybody had one, unless they were penniless … or dead.
He fell back and hooked a turn into a pleasant-looking neighborhood, less a conscious decision than an impulse to get out of sight. With the ga
s tank running low and five dollars in his pocket, his immediate need was obvious. He needed money, and while he’d never before sunk to thievery, DeBolt saw little recourse but to leverage his newfound abilities in that direction. He had to find a way.
He regarded the homes on a quiet suburban street in ways he never had before. Front doors, coach lights, newspapers in driveways. A canopy of trees formed an archway above the road, filtering light and expanding shadows. When performing rescues DeBolt had always preferred the light of day, yet being hunted brought a new perspective. He edged the car toward darkened curbs and coasted behind stands of foliage. The neighborhood was tony, large and elegant residences on one-acre lots, towers of brick and mortar that seemed more statements than homes. Unlike so many developments where the land was first clear-cut, the houses here had been trenched into the surrounding forest. Which made for good cover.
At an intersection he paused to check the road name, then continued slowly and combined that with the numbers on mailboxes. It was difficult at first, certain requests denied, formats not recognized. After much trial and error, however, responses began to flow.
87 MILL STREET: OWNERS OF RECORD, MR. AND MRS. JAMES REDIFER.
DeBolt saw two cars in the driveway. He kept going.
90 MILL STREET: OWNERS OF RECORD, DON AND LINDA BRUNS.
No cars in the driveway. DeBolt paused, until he discovered that Linda was a local veterinarian whose office was closed today.
After five inquiries, DeBolt touched the brake pedal for the first time at 98 Mill Street: Owners, Paul and Lori Thompson. No cars in the driveway. More pertinently, Paul Thompson was the principal registered owner of a defunct hedge fund. He had recently been arrested and charged with embezzlement, and was currently awaiting arraignment in a New York City federal detention facility. He was also fighting tax-evasion charges from the IRS. DeBolt pursued the legal trail and, by means he could not envision, discovered that a warrant was pending judicial approval for a search of Thompson’s homes in New York, Key West, and Maine.
Also unearthed: Lori Thompson, apparently unfazed by her husband’s professional exertions, had used her credit card this morning at Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, and a Starbucks in Manhattan. DeBolt also learned the couple had no children, presumably increasing the odds that no one was presently in the house. He weighed other methods to confirm that the home was unoccupied, and targeted the Eastern Main Electric Cooperative. After a ninety-second delay, he was looking at the previous month’s electric bill: $42.12. This for a home of at least five thousand square feet. He was satisfied. Nobody was home at 98 Mill Street.