So, if he assumed for the time being that Angela actually knew who the hell her husband was, that meant that Jack had either survived Afghanistan and somehow made it back here, or …
Dimensional jumps are possible.
He shook his head again, having a difficult time accepting either possibility. But, if he assumed for the moment that the latter was true, then it meant that the technology existed to achieve that, and that further meant it had to be protected at all cost, including making sure the knowledge of its existence remained secret until he could unravel all of this.
And that technology likely resided in the carefully packed suit inside that oversized helmet he had retrieved among the smoldering remains of Angela’s house—a suit he intended to thoroughly inspect the moment he got back to the Cape.
Aside from a few bullet holes, the suit had been protected from the multiple explosions by a helmet that on the surface appeared designed to survive the immense G-forces and heat of reentry.
He stared out the window as his driver approached the base’s exit and turned toward the Cape.
Possession of the suit, however, wasn’t enough to get to the bottom of this.
Pete also needed Angela—and even Jack—more than ever.
He continued inspecting the world beyond the tinted glass window, but in his mind he saw her hazel eyes.
Less than forty-eight hours ago, he had cooked dinner for her, and even brought up the subject of moving in together. He’d had feelings for the beautiful scientist from the moment he’d laid eyes on her years ago, during the early days of Project Phoenix, before Jack had entered the scene. But he had been too slow, too shy, and perhaps too damn professional to date an employee, allowing Jack to slide right in and steal her away. But destiny had given him a second chance after Jack was killed in Afghanistan. And he had been patient, probably far more than any reasonable man should, holding her hand, giving her a shoulder to cry on, supporting her during her long mourning period, being a friend while hanging on to the hope that one day their friendship would become something more.
And just when their relationship finally started moving in his desired direction, he had received the most bizarre phone call of his life.
He looked down and frowned.
The last thing Pete had wanted was to hurt his girlfriend and former best friend. But Jack had to be Jack, starting a firefight, attacking his men, forcing Pete’s hand.
But then again, Jack probably wouldn’t have gone SEAL on him if Pete hadn’t appeared with soldiers and deployed them around the—
His phone started to vibrate. It was Hastings, his boss up in Washington.
“Good morning, sir,” he said.
“Pete, I just got the DHS update. How are you holding up?”
“As good as can be expected. We lost a few men in the firefight.”
“That’s a damn tragedy. Any word on the bastards responsible for this mess?”
“DHS is launching a combined effort to search the grid and look for any debris that might give us a clue, but I’m not holding much hope for that. The blast was pretty severe, and they were already in fairly deep waters with strong Gulf Stream currents.”
“How many terrorists do you estimate were involved?”
“We’re guessing at least three or four to put up the fight they did at Angela’s house.”
“So you think we lost her?”
“I’m afraid so, sir. They took her hostage, and we have every reason to believe she was aboard the boat when it went off. I think they were after our old Project Phoenix technology. Remember Al-Qaeda got its hands on that early suit version in Afghanistan.”
“Yeah,” Hastings said with a heavy sigh. “Hard to forget that one.”
“I’m thinking they may have wanted Angela to help them take the design to the next level. And as harsh as it sounds, given the options of her being captured alive or what just transpired, I guess from a national security perspective the latter is the lesser of the evils.”
Silence, followed by, “I know, but it’s still a real shame. First we lost Jack and now her. I had high hopes for that program way back, you know.”
“I know, sir. So did I. They were also my friends. I only wished I would have brought more soldiers to her house after I got her distress message,” he replied.
“Don’t beat yourself over it, Pete. You did all you could, including dialing 911 and even getting there faster than the cops. Who knew you would be walking into a terrorist ambush. It’s Cocoa Beach, for crying out loud. And who the hell would have expected them to come after Dr. Taylor five years later?”
“I know,” Pete replied. “We kept a security detail on her for almost a year, finally dismissing them when we went through that project’s budget cuts, plus she had already left NASA, so it became difficult to justify the expense.”
“I know,” Hastings said. “We had to mothball Project Phoenix and allocate resources to more promising projects. It was the right call then, and it’s still the right call now. Look at how much progress we’ve made since on our other programs. And much of the credit belongs to you for helping us focus our limited resources to get the biggest bang.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“All right,” Hastings said. “I need to run now. Let me know if there’s anything we can do at this end, Pete, and I’ll be down in a week to go through our standard program reviews. There’s also … something else we need to discuss. But it’s better done in person.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, glad that Hastings had bought his cover story, but now intrigued by the general’s last comment.
He hung up and decided to put that aside for now. At the moment he had more pressing issues, including thinking through a plan to not just inspect the suit in secrecy for now, but also to locate Angela and Jack.
Pete looked into the distance, toward the ocean.
* * *
The explosion was visible even from five miles away, followed a few seconds later by a sound wave resembling distant thunder.
“Oh, my God,” she mumbled in the darkness, standing next to him.
“It’s done,” Jack said, turning off the remote detonator before flipping the bilge blowers of the thirty-nine-foot Tiara he had quietly towed out to sea from the ranks of moored motors and sail yachts dotting the large waterway of the Fort Pierce marina.
The rest had been easy, transferring their gear, including the scuba equipment, to the larger vessel, which he hoped wouldn’t be reported stolen for a few hours. Jack had then placed a C4 charge next to the Boston Whaler’s gas tank and pointed it out to sea, accelerating to twenty knots before engaging the autopilot and jumping off, swimming back a thousand feet to the Tiara, where Angela was busy securing their gear to the bungees lining the port and starboard railings of the yacht’s open stern.
He bypassed the simple key ignition system and waited sixty seconds to clear out any fumes from the engine compartment below, which housed a pair of Crusader 350HP gas inboards, before engaging the portside engine, which came to life with a low rumbling sound. He watched the oil pressure climb into the green before punching the button for the starboard-side engine, which caught right away.
He inspected the gauges once more while letting them warm up, confirming his initial inspection of the yacht back at the marina. The vessel was old but well maintained, with a two-thirds full 398-gallon tank, plenty to get them to their destination while the Coast Guard—and whoever else Pete had searching for them—remained distracted by his diversion.
Turning on all navigation lights, he slowly advanced the port and starboard throttles in unison while engaging the stern trim tabs, bringing the yacht to an efficient plane angle as they reached a relaxed cruise speed of twenty knots about a mile from shore.
The Tiara sliced through the waves far easier than the smaller Whaler as Jack sat back on the wide bench behind the controls and Angela snuggled up next to him again, her chest pressed against his arm. Being much longer and heavier, the ya
cht also gave them a much gentler and quieter ride, especially behind the controls, protected by a tall and semicircular windshield that cut down the wind noise, allowing them to hold a conversation without having to shout.
“Looks like about three hours to Miami Beach,” she said, her head on his shoulder and her eyes on the GPS while he nodded in agreement before surveying the dark horizon, spotting a few vessels far out at sea, but nothing directly ahead as they followed the coastline toward the tip of the peninsula.
“Yep. And that should keep them busy for a while,” he said, extending a thumb over his left shoulder.
“Let’s hope so,” she said, reaching in her jeans’ front pocket. “We need time to figure out what the hell this is.”
Jack glared at her hand in disbelief as she held the purple glass token.
“Angie! You got it!”
“Of course,” she said. “I wasn’t going to leave it behind for that son of a bitch.”
Jack grinned.
“This is the one module I don’t understand in that suit,” she added.
“Thank you,” he said, perhaps with more gratitude than he wished to show.
“I know you need to get back to your world, Jack … and to your wife.”
“Angie, I—”
“Hush,” she added. “But I also want to make sure that you understand that while you’re in my world, you belong to me. Clear?”
“Crystal,” he said.
“Good,” she replied, tightening her grip on his arm. “First thing we need to do is figure out what this is supposed to do.”
“It has to be connected to the light I saw,” he replied.
“The question is how, Jack,” she said, before biting her lower lip while staring into the darkness, thinking. The navigation lights cast an almost magical glow across her profile, narrowed hazel eyes glistening.
His emotional side overpowered all logic, making him wonder if he really wanted to go home.
Ever.
“What I don’t get,” Angela added, completely oblivious of the thoughts splitting through his common sense. “How can a little piece of glass like this with an embedded integrated circuit wreak such havoc on the laws of physics?”
“I know,” he said, refocusing his thoughts. “But you said you knew someone who might be able to help?”
“I do,” she said. “His name is Jonathan Layton, a professor of theoretical physics at FIT.”
“How well do you know this guy?”
“Quite well, actually. He’s in his late sixties and lost his wife to breast cancer two years ago. Very sweet old man, and very smart, too. Took me under his wing in the department when I first came in.”
“Does Pete know you know him?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Because I’m sure he’s going to be under surveillance, so we’re going to have to figure out a way to approach him without alerting any tails.”
“How?” she asked.
“Not sure yet. Add that to the list of things we’ll need to figure out,” he said. “Starting with how Pete’s playing this out.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how is he explaining all of this to his superiors? I don’t think he simply told them I’ve come back from the dead … or from another dimension. But somehow he was able to gather up quite a few soldiers in no time, plus enlist the Coast Guard and probably even a few Air Force drones to track us down.”
“Here’s one way to find out,” Angela said, reaching for the radio on the console, next to the instrumentation, and once more began to scan the Coast Guard frequencies.
“Good thinking,” he said.
It didn’t take longer than twenty minutes listening to conversations between Coast Guard personnel to start to paint a picture of their situation, which included her death at the hand of Al-Qaeda terrorists on American soil.
Angela sat back, fuming. “I can’t fucking believe it.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“First he lied to me and tried to have us killed, then he blew up our house, and now the asshole’s telling the whole world that I’m dead at the hands of terrorists.” Crossing her arms, she stared into the distance while biting her lower lip.
He put an arm around her. “He’ll get what’s coming to him. Though I have to admit, the man’s pretty smart.”
She swung her head in his direction. “What?”
“Smart,” he repeated. “By claiming this was a terrorist attack and having you killed in the process, he can now legally and quite easily freeze all of your assets, from bank accounts and credit cards to all of your investments and pension plans. That’s his way to force you to the surface. It’s a lot harder hiding out without funds.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“It’s just how he’s making his moves. Now we have to make ours.”
“So you think he believes we survived the blast?”
“Probably. I mean, he knows my skills, and frankly stealing a boat while planting a remotely detonated blast in another is a cakewalk for me. I’m betting he believes you’re alive and on the run with me, but he’s having the whole world think you’re dead via suicide bombers.”
“That way he can get everybody to forget about me,” she said, completing his thought.
“Right, and notice I haven’t been mentioned in any of the reports, and there’s also no mention of whatever he was able to recover from that OSS after the house exploded.”
“Which could be quite a bit,” she said.
“Maybe. But I saw it being peppered with bullets, and that was before the grenades detonated inside the house.”
“Yeah, but I had packed it in the helmet, so even though it may have some bullet holes, the remaining ablation layer on the helmet would have gone a long way to protect it from the shockwaves and flames.”
Jack hadn’t considered that and nodded. “Well, in any case, now that Pete’s got everybody looking away from us, he’s free to deploy his own little soldiers and come after us again, though I get the feeling he’ll be a little more covert this time around. I’m sure he wants to get his hands on you—and probably even me—so we can help him rebuild this technology, which is obviously very powerful and…”
Jack stopped, staring at the horizon, though his eyes weren’t really looking at the sky’s colors changing from black to indigo.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Oh, shit,” he mumbled.
“What, Jack?”
“Hastings. I think I’ve just figured out what the son of a bitch is after.”
They stared at each other in semidarkness.
“Dimension jumps,” she said, her eyes widening. “That connects the observations we made at the house, from your strange fall through that storm to showing up at my doorstep five years after you died.”
“Yep. That’s also why Hastings appeared at the Cape and brought his gurus along to screw with the suit and incorporate whatever that piece of glass is.”
She stared at him awhile and said, “Hastings has much larger plans than simply dropping down on his enemies around the globe with orbital jumpers, Jack.”
“Exactly, but why use me for the first dimension jump? Was it because he wasn’t sure if it would work?”
“Possibly,” she said. “Maybe he needed a test run.”
“Sure, but once I jumped and crossed over, I would be beyond his reach. If his intention was to send his own army of orbital jumpers to this Earth—for whatever reasons—then me being here ahead of his own team makes me a liability.”
“Unless you were never supposed to make it,” she offered.
“What do you mean?”
“The descent profile change. The one I … Angela in your world ultimately chose, Alpha-G, resulted in a convergence of the harmonic of twelve across all energy levels. Alpha-B wouldn’t have accomplished such a unique alignment of energy conversions. You would have certainly reached the right altitude of one hundred and twenty thou
sand feet, but either the outside temperature, or the G-forces, or the vertical velocity would have been off.”
Jack considered that while scanning the gauges, verifying heading and speed.
“But,” he finally said, “the purple haze began well before I chose a descent profile. The portal was starting to get activated miles before I reached that energy alignment.”
“And I think that’s where this comes in,” she said, holding the glass token. “Somehow—and believe me, I will figure it out—this little gadget, combined with the energy alignment of Alpha-G, did the trick.”
“If that’s the case, then why did Hastings plant this in my suit and then insist on Alpha-B? Did he just want me to get close enough to the dimensional jump to check his technology, but without actually doing it?”
“Maybe, but I don’t have enough information to answer that,” the scientist in her said. “But I believe I will after I get this into the right hands.”
Jack rubbed the tips of his fingers against his sore chest and continued monitoring the gauges as the Tiara’s hull fought the swells, putting more distance between them and the search vessels, buying them time to think, to theorize, to piece together how in the world he had managed to achieve what he was certain no other human being had ever done.
And as hues of orange and yellow-gold began to stain the indigo horizon—as Jack stared at his very first sunrise in this new world—his mind desperately clung to the hope that somewhere past the looming sun, somewhere beyond the span of time and space, his wife was also hard at work unraveling this mystery, applying all of her skills, her training, her experience—everything locked inside that brilliant mind of hers—to help him find a way back home.
Somehow.
* * *
Angela sipped an energy drink while staring at the clouds over central Florida from the back porch of Dr. Olivia Wiltz’s home in Melbourne, which faced the woods leading to her old alma mater, the campus of the Florida Institute of Technology.
The first round with Olivia hadn’t gone well. The woman was obviously scared out of her mind not just for her own safety, but for that of her daughter, Erika, and she had basically clammed up, demanding protection before releasing any information.
The Fall Page 18