Cutting Edge

by Ward Larsen

  “Normally, yes,” she said, “but unfortunately this particular airplane is having a technical issue. I’m afraid you will have to disconnect for a few hours.”

  He grinned widely. “Not such a bad thing. I almost wish I could make it permanent.” She smiled understandingly, then put cream in his coffee and was gone.

  The city slipped away and a dark ocean took its place. The intimately familiar seascape below put DeBolt further at ease. By some strange pull, he tried for a connection, and managed one for a time. He used it to plot the position of Shannon Lund’s cell phone—and presumably Lund herself. She was somewhere south of Washington, D.C., which implied she wasn’t on her way back to Kodiak after all. He guessed she was continuing her search on META in some faceless government office. Maybe she’d even found something useful. His thoughts then turned tangential, to the safe house in Boston that wasn’t safe at all, and he remembered Lund reaching up and kissing him. Remembered being glad that she had.

  He conjured up her cell phone number on the monitor in his head. DeBolt composed a simple text message: All is well. Stay safe, Shannon. Trey.

  He launched it into cyberspace, and a response came immediately.

  INTERMITTENT SIGNAL

  He tried to send it once more. DeBolt couldn’t tell if it went through.

  * * *

  “I’m standing at the United Airlines counter right now,” said Lund. She was talking to her commander, Special Agent Jonathan Wheeley.

  “How long will it take you to get here?” he asked.

  “It looks like tomorrow afternoon. I checked Reagan National, but that would have taken longer. Dulles has the best options, but it takes at least three flights.”

  “All right. And would you like to explain why you’re in D.C. right now?”

  Lund shut her eyes reflexively. She didn’t want to lie, but the truth was hardly an option. That would only put Trey further at risk—either that or get her an appointment with a Coast Guard–appointed psychiatrist. “It’s a long story,” she said.

  Wheeley remained silent.

  “Boss, look … you’ve always been straight with me, and I appreciate that. But there are a lot of complications here.”

  “Do any of them involve what happened to Jim?”

  “Yes … but not directly … I mean, it’s just too hard to explain.”

  “All right, Shannon. But I’ll tell you one thing right now—if you didn’t have a rock-solid alibi, you would not be flying home commercial and unescorted.”

  For the first time she heard coldness in Wheeley’s voice, a tone that said he wasn’t going to venture out on any long limbs to save her career. With a strange feeling of liberation, Lund realized she didn’t care. “I understand. I’ll be in touch as soon as I land in Kodiak.”

  “You do that.”

  A click, and she was free.

  Lund slid her phone in the back pocket of her pants, and then looked at the ticketing line. It was relatively short, and the flight she needed didn’t leave for three hours. She went outside to the departures curb, lit up a cigarette, and took a long draw. It was wonderful. Traffic swirled all around, engines humming and horns blaring. Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Lund pulled it out expecting a follow-up from Jon Wheeley. She saw instead a text message: All is well. Stay safe, Shannon. On way to Vienna to track down Dr. Atif Patel regarding META. Trey.

  Her heart seemed to stutter, and she stood stock-still. Relief, joy, fear—all of it hit at the same time. Trey had gotten clear of the bloodshed in Boston. He was not only alive, but free. Dr. Atif Patel? She had no idea who he was, or what connection he had to META. She only knew that Trey was going to Vienna to seek him out.

  Lund nearly responded, but as soon as her thumbs touched the keypad she hesitated. The text had come from a number she’d never seen. She was positive her phone had been tampered with—the photo of Douglas Wilson had vaporized. Was it safe to respond? Or would doing so only highlight Trey’s position? Was this new message even from Trey?

  More than ever, she understood what he was going through. She was trapped in a cyber corner, not sure how things worked. In this glorious new age of information, Lund found herself in a digital house of mirrors, every bit of information, every revelation descending into the realm of virtual reality. She had seen photos disappear, seen her text threads altered. What was real? What was manufactured?

  She took a long look at the message, feeling helpless, increasingly adrift. META seemed everywhere, and now its vortex was pulling her in—as inexorably as it had Trey. Her thumbs came off the screen and she rushed inside. Lund checked the big departures board. Sixty seconds later she was in the United Airlines ticketing line. She stared impatiently at her watch.

  45

  KLM Flight 23 landed smoothly in Amsterdam at 8:09 the next morning, twin puffs of blue smoke whirling from its main landing gear on touchdown. DeBolt looked through his window, the glass peppered with condensation, and saw a brooding day in the making, steady rain and mist obscuring a milky sky. He’d slept well on the overnight flight, but as the massive jet lumbered toward the terminal, anxiety made its own landing.

  Two questions governed his thoughts, and the first was answered immediately. On the screen in his mind he entered and sent the words: Amsterdam Schiphol METAR.

  The response was almost immediate. It felt like a benediction.

  METAR EHAM: 11240755Z 06008 1BR 2OVC 10/08 Q1009

  METAR was the international format for aviation weather—as a helicopter crew member, DeBolt knew how to decipher it. Cool, wet, misty, fifty degrees—it was a lousy day in Amsterdam. Far more relevant—his private telecom network seemed operable in Europe. There had been no way to know if META would reach this far, so DeBolt was immensely relieved. He was sure the system had been birthed, at some level, inside the United States Department of Defense. But that gave no guarantee it would work worldwide. Then again, if META truly was some type of military program, wouldn’t that be the point? He imagined a unit of men like Delta, all able to access unlimited data from any place in the world. How lethal a force multiplier would that be?

  DeBolt’s musings were cut short when the airplane reached the terminal. There his second concern rose to the forefront. Would Ronald Anderson’s identity get him through Dutch immigration? That question ran headlong to an answer. He was one of the first passengers to disembark, and found no line whatsoever at the customs and immigration queues—another perk of business class—where a stern-faced blond man took his passport.

  The irony of that moment was not lost on DeBolt. He had been born in Colorado, yet his parents were both Dutch, as was his surname. Standing at the immigration booth as Ronald Anderson, DeBolt looked at a man who one generation ago would have been his countryman, the same light hair and blue eyes, the same open facial features. There was a fleeting moment of panic that one Dutchman might recognize another, some primal ethnic connection. Then the passport came back through the window and DeBolt heard, “Have a nice stay in Holland, Mr. Anderson.”

  It was over that quickly. With no luggage, DeBolt walked outside to the curb and ran headlong into the cacophony of cars and busses that ringed every big airport. There he stood and tried to work out his next problem: how best to cover the last five hundred miles to Vienna.

  * * *

  Two hours after DeBolt reached Amsterdam, Lund arrived in Vienna on the nonstop United flight from Dulles. She was arrested immediately.

  They were waiting in the gate area, two uniformed policemen and a plainclothes officer with a photograph in his hand.

  “Shannon Lund?” the man with the photo asked as she emerged from the jetway amid a single-file crowd.

  It was an ominous introduction, and one that left no room for denial. “Yes.”

  “I am Oberkommissar Dieter Strauss of the Bundespolizei. You must come with us.” The man’s accent was hard on the consonants. As a law enforcement officer, Lund realized he was not making a request.

  “What is th
is about?” she asked.

  “The United States has formally requested your detention. It relates to a criminal matter, but I can say no more here.”

  Lund wasn’t surprised. Not really. Wheeley, or someone higher in the chain, had flagged her passport. Not soon enough to keep her from leaving the United States, but a ten-hour flight had allowed them to play catch-up. She was now a demonstrated flight risk, which wouldn’t make her situation back home any easier. Worst of all—it brought her efforts to help Trey to a skidding halt.

  She said the only thing that came to mind. “I’d like to talk to someone from the embassy.”

  The policeman grinned with one side of his mouth. “And someone from the embassy wants very much to talk to you. You will meet them at Bundespolizei headquarters.”

  “I checked a bag.”

  “One of my men is retrieving it now. Oh, and I must ask you for your mobile.” He held out an empty hand.

  Reluctantly, Lund reached into her purse and handed over her Samsung. The inspector seemed to study the device, then found the correct button to turn it off.

  “Anything else?” she said with undisguised annoyance—even if she would have handled things precisely as Oberkommissar Strauss had if their places were reversed.

  “No,” said the policeman.

  “Okay, then let’s get on with it.”

  Everyone played their roles with staid civility. There were no cuffs, and they guided Lund to an unmarked government car which, twenty minutes later, delivered them to the side entrance of a building marked simply POLIZEI.

  She was escorted through a long hall, rose three floors in an elevator, to be finally deposited in a very secure-looking interrogation room with a cipher lock on the door. Lund was given a water bottle, denied a cigarette, and asked very politely to wait.

  As if she had a choice.

  46

  With the bulk of his journey behind him, DeBolt decided a train was the least-risk option for the remainder. Rail to Vienna would take twelve hours, even on high-speed ICE trains, but now that he was established in the E.U., it seemed the most likely way to travel without further testing the passport of Ronald Anderson.

  He exchanged dollars for euros at a station currency kiosk. He had enjoyed the business class transatlantic flight, but with limited cash going forward, DeBolt opted for an economy seat on the train. The first leg to Cologne was relatively short, a two-hour blur on a high-speed route. He spent an hour at the station in Cologne where he exchanged the remainder of his dollars for euros, and took an espresso and a sweet roll at a track-side teashop. He also continued to test META’s network.

  Since arriving in Europe he’d had no trouble getting a connection using his internal wiring. As far as he knew, the only way tell if things were working was to make a request. He found himself wishing he had a status bar above his screen to display the current signal strength. If I ever meet the designer, he thought, maybe I’ll mention it.

  Even with a connection, DeBolt was unsure what META could do on this side of the Atlantic. Were there differences, limitations? Slower response times? He began with the facial-recognition application, and was mildly disappointed by the results—roughly half of his inputs came back with positive IDs, many of these proving to be Americans. He guessed that certain European countries, and probably much of the rest of the world, didn’t register driver’s license or passport photos in whatever database he was accessing. Or perhaps META was restricted from breaching the servers of particular countries.

  He tried for identities on a number of people who he thought might be recent immigrants from the Middle East and Africa—DeBolt knew Europe was awash in refugees, and train stations were ground zero. Not a single one registered. The reason seemed apparent. Without a known image on file for comparison, it didn’t matter how good your correlation software was. DeBolt also noted that many responses seemed to take longer, perhaps because his information had to funnel through fiber-optic cables miles under the Atlantic Ocean.

  He noticed a security camera near the teashop entrance, and wondered if he might be able to get a feed, much as he’d done at the embezzler’s house outside Calais. Camera networks, from what he remembered, were everywhere in Europe, and the idea of accessing them seemed unthinkable. He experimented with a few commands, but nothing seemed to work. As he did, DeBolt watched a constant stream of people come and go through the doorway, and he imagined what it would be like to track them through the indifferent eyes of so many black-and-white feeds. Everyone going about their business, not realizing they were being watched, or perhaps not caring. If he could gain that power? It would be intoxicating and voyeuristic, like being night watchman to the world.

  He was considering whether to explore the concept further, outside the station, when reality intervened. So engrossed was DeBolt in this new idea, he nearly missed his train. He scrambled aboard with two minutes to spare, took a seat by the window, and marveled at META: there had to be hundreds of possibilities he hadn’t even considered yet.

  DeBolt settled in for an afternoon spent traversing the Rhine Valley and Bavaria. He set aside the what-ifs and committed to more practical research, even if he undertook it in a way that few people on earth could imagine—he closed his eyes and envisioned what he wanted.

  He learned nothing more about Dr. Atif Patel, deepening his suspicions that the man had specifically blocked searches. More alarmingly, he learned that Shannon Lund’s reservation on a United Airlines flight from Dulles to Kodiak had been canceled. DeBolt searched from every angle he could think of—airline reservations, TSA records, mobile phone tracking, credit card usage—but found nothing on Lund’s current whereabouts. Had she taken some obscure route home, perhaps on a military transport? Or was she still on the East Coast digging for information? Either way, he decided she was safe. Safe because she was nowhere near him.

  He slept intermittently, fitfully, until 5:42 that evening when, under a driving November rain, the train drew smoothly and punctually into Vienna’s Wien Westbahnhof.

  * * *

  Late that same afternoon, another jet landed at Vienna International Airport. The A330 taxied home, was umbilicaled to its jetway, and passengers began to disembark. Among them was a large bald man who, weary after forty-eight hours of travel, was relieved to reach an end point.

  Delta did not consider Austria home, but he’d come to like the place. He liked the food, the beer, and most of all the fact that because so many languages were spoken here—and inversely, so many not spoken—people didn’t find it peculiar when he failed to respond to their questions or reply to conversational openers. He simply answered with a shrug, and nobody seemed to mind.

  He slipped uneventfully through immigration using a new identity, the pretext of Douglas Wilson having exceeded its shelf life. He’d kept that one longer than he should have, a mistake that had necessitated his second trip to Alaska. Lesson learned. For years the Marine Corps had dispatched him across the world to do its own brand of violence, but those travels had typically been undertaken on military transports, or occasionally commercial flights, under his real name. He’d dabbled in clandestine work, but it was not his forte. Delta was a killer, no more and no less, an asset built for sand dunes and ditches and jungles, for urban assault in third-world hovels. Give him a door to breach, an MP4, maybe a few grenades, and he could sanitize a room with what bordered on artistry.

  He was getting better at these new missions, the secrets and duplicity. And he would continue to do so. Delta had only begun to explore what his new abilities allowed. The more he learned, the more lethal he would become. There was already no soldier on earth like him. Not the prima donna squad he’d eliminated in Boston. Certainly not Bravo. A Coastie, he thought derisively. A man whose only training involved saving lives. Still, Bravo had been enabled with META, so he couldn’t be underestimated. He wasn’t a threat, but if he learned how to leverage his powers he could prove very elusive.

  Delta initiated communications as
soon as he reached the line of taxis outside. His instructions were waiting:

  DONAUKANAL

  He knew it well enough, a place they had met before. He went to the first cab in line and slid into the backseat. The driver turned and said, “Wohin gehst du?”

  Delta took out one of his cards, along with the pen he always carried, and wrote an address on the back. The driver, a thickset Bavarian with a day’s growth of stubble, made an upside-down U with his mouth and nodded to imply that he understood.

  As they struck away from the curb, it occurred to Delta that communicating with the cards carried a degree of operational risk. He was leaving a written record of his destination with the driver. Of course, the man knew where they were going anyway, and could relay it after the fact to the police or any adversary. Still, it was yet another complication brought on by his condition. A small problem, but a problem all the same. The card also confirmed his inability to speak, and the fact that he was a United States Marine who’d been injured in combat. All true. He was proud of his service, but in light of his new trajectory in life, he supposed it was unwise to offer information unnecessarily. Any of it might be traceable, perhaps in ways he didn’t even understand. Fingerprints or DNA on the card itself. There were some clever people in this world. Very clever indeed. He was on his way to meet one of them right now.

  47

  Delta paid the cab at the base of a bridge whose name he didn’t know. He could have found out easily enough, but he’d long ago committed to not squandering his abilities on the trivial. His connectivity was an awesome weapon, and that was how he treated it, like a gun kept clean and oiled to be ready on a moment’s notice.

  It was nearly seven o’clock when he found Patel standing near the Badeschiff, or bathing boat, a barge moored along the river that had been ridiculously converted into a swimming pool. The diminutive Patel did not see him approaching, and when he finally sensed Delta’s presence he turned with a start.