The Fall

by R. J. Pineiro

  I can’t let up for one moment, he thought, making a fist and staring at it.

  An iron fist. He understood then why every successful dictator had to take the same unyielding approach. There was no other choice. He had let his guard down for a moment and ended up with a damn FBI agent as head of his personal security.

  But I’ll make them pay.

  His people were already probing through the FBI database to track down the whereabouts of Riggs, Flaherty, and the crafty Dr. Taylor, and it was only a matter of time before he learned where the Bureau had hidden them.

  They think they’re safe. But I’ll find them. And when I do …

  Hastings tightened his fist until the knuckles turned white. There was a time when he would have done the deed personally. But these days, it was in his best interest to remain isolated from his security team, who also didn’t get their hands dirty but managed independent teams of mercenaries, hired guns, and contractors—professionals who would kill their own mothers for the right price, and who, if caught, wouldn’t be able to incriminate his organization, much less him.

  Hastings stared out the window, his thoughts drifting to those aged and yellow photographs in his father’s study. He remembered their battlefield faces, marred in dust and blood, recalled the awards, the medals, all carefully arranged in sealed shadow boxes on the walls, and those priceless vintage rifles and pistols behind the glass of humidity-controlled cases.

  And one day all of it became his to own, to cherish, and eventually pass on to his own son. But Hastings never had time for a wife, let alone a family, always too focused on his career, on his vision.

  He slowly shook his head, imagining the conversation at the family dinner table. Honey, how was your day? Today I had breakfast with drug dealers from Juárez, spent the morning with the Russian Mafia transporting illegal minerals into the country, and the afternoon blackmailing politicians—could you pass the bread, please?

  Besides, Hastings never actually came across a woman he considered worthy of his seed, someone with that unique combination of strength, courage, conviction, and intelligence to enhance the Hastings’s unique gene pool, to create the right specimen to carry on his legacy—someone who wasn’t afraid to fight the good fight, who would never surrender, even when confronted with seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

  Hastings realized that what he needed wasn’t a family and the burdens and obligations that came with it. He didn’t need a wife or a home or a fucking Thanksgiving dinner. GW had raised Michael Hastings after Ulysses perished in World War I. GW hadn’t needed a wife or a family to continue the legacy. He had just needed one strong boy, the one who survived the Spanish Influenza epidemic while his siblings and his own mother perished. GW had simply needed someone he could shape into his image, could instill the code of honor passed down from generation to generation.

  As his mind recalled all of those medals and awards, from Theodore, GW, Ulysses, and Michael, he realized that what he needed was just a strong kid, someone whom Hastings could guide, coach, develop into his successor. And to do that all he needed was a disposable female host with the right attributes, from strength and intellect to unparalleled courage under fire—the key characteristic of his distinguished family tree.

  He needed a female host who would never shy from fighting the good fight, someone who simply didn’t know how to quit, how to capitulate, even when facing appalling odds.

  And that’s when the thought came to him.

  Hastings shook his head at the simple and devious elegance of his solution to creating an offspring.

  He quickly contacted his security team and said, “Kill everyone … except Angela Taylor. I want to be very clear about this. I need her … unharmed.”

  * * *

  Getting out unharmed proved challenging.

  Jack had spotted one sentry still standing by the palmetto thickets lining the corridor at the edge of the parking lot, which he had to cross to get to his truck.

  But what he hadn’t realized was that the couple who had apparently been making out in the car hadn’t been just a pair of hormonal college kids.

  They were actually operatives, who wasted little time exiting their vehicle the moment Jack stepped out of the building, where Angela and Layton would remain hidden until he could fetch the truck and pick them up.

  The mercenary by the palmettos remained put, like a lookout, while the couple moved in swiftly for the kill.

  Jack pretended not to see them as he went straight for the weathered truck, drawing them in, but always keeping at least one row of cars in between as he cut back and forth, forcing them to split up, before dropping out of sight, rolling under an SUV and retrieving his SOG knife.

  The male operative appeared first, making the mistake of not wearing combat boots, which would have protected his Achilles tendons when Jack slashed the steel blade out from under the vehicle, severing the sensitive ligaments on the right foot.

  The operative fell, screaming in Russian, his pronounced Slavic features tight with obvious pain, fingers reaching for the wound while Jack rolled out, surging to his feet and kicking him across the left temple.

  One down.

  The woman came at him like a jungle cat, silently, swiftly, agile, short blades protruding in between the index and middle fingers of her fists. Her long hair in a tight ponytail swinging around like a loose whip, her eyes, as dark as her hair, focused on him as she pivoted on her right foot while bringing the edge of her left foot up at an impossible angle, catching Jack by surprise, smacking him across the face.

  He shifted back, momentarily stung, but glad that she didn’t weigh much more than Angela, meaning less mass behind her strikes. Had that roundhouse been delivered by a large male operative, Jack probably would have been knocked out.

  But what she lacked in strength, she more than made up in speed as she pivoted again, like a deadly ballerina, with grace, speed, and a ridiculous stretch that signaled she was double-jointed.

  He focused on the blades and her torso, and this time he was ready, blocking the incoming roundhouse kick with his left forearm while palm-striking her sternum, knocking her light frame toward a parked van.

  He risked a quick look toward the palmettos, spotting the operative now running toward them as she bounced against the fender, fell, rolled, and was back on her feet before Jack could follow up. Her eyes, glistening with anger and pain, matched her compressed lips as she charged again, hands crisscrossing fast, the blades glittering, reflecting the streetlights, aimed for his throat.

  Damn, she’s quick, he thought, dropping to a deep crouch to get away from those sharp edges while pivoting on his left leg, swinging his right one just a foot off the ground in a wide and fast arc, striking her calves, knocking her legs out from under her.

  She yelled and fell, landing hard on her back.

  He was about to kick her across the temple, too, when she rolled away, her legs scissoring as she pivoted to her feet, her hands still clutching the knives, coming at him again.

  She definitely gets an A for effort.

  Jack stepped back, avoiding the slashes before stepping in, stiffening the index and middle fingers of his right hand, like a viper’s tongue, stabbing her eyes, shocking the optic nerves before driving the heel of his right palm against her nose at an upward angle.

  She instantly dropped the blades, falling to her knees, before collapsing on her side just as the third operative stopped ten feet away, a hand reaching inside his jacket.

  Jack threw the SOG knife on instinct, the blade slashing through the space separating them, flickering in the dim yellow light, its scalpel-sharp tip piercing the mercenary just below the chin, slicing through his windpipe.

  He fell to his knees, hands reaching for the blade, trying to pull it free as he drowned in his own blood, as Jack reached him an instant later, gripping the handle while kicking him in the chest, yanking out the blade and stepping back as blood spurted from the wound.

  The operative t
ried to speak, but Jack knew it was futile. Their eyes locked for a moment before he rolled on his side in convulsions.

  Jack left him there and rushed to the truck, getting in, and drove it around to the front of the building, where he bumped the horn twice.

  Angela rushed out of the double glass doors and climbed in, followed by Layton, who hauled a leather briefcase.

  “What took you so long?” she asked, scooting over on the bench seat, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder.

  Before he could reply, she added, “What happened to your face?”

  “Bumped into someone,” Jack said, stepping on the gas, wishing to get the hell out of Dodge before word got out.

  “Jack?”

  “There are three less mercenaries looking for us now.”

  “Oh,” she said, understanding, putting a hand on the side of his face. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m good. Really. Don’t worry.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. “It’s my job to worry.”

  “And it’s my job to keep us safe, which means we need to get away from here. So, where to?” he asked, steering the truck.

  “First to Orlando International,” she said, taking a closer look at the spot right in between his right temple and his eye where the woman had landed that kick.

  He appreciated the gesture but was starting to get annoyed, though he didn’t let it show as he asked, “Why the airport?”

  “We’re dividing and conquering, Jack. Jonathan’s headed for Cambridge to meet with one of my former MIT colleagues, an astrophysicist who just agreed to help us work out the details of your upcoming jump.”

  Jack processed that before asking the obvious question: “What about your classes, Jonathan? Isn’t that going to signal back to Pete that we’re up to something?”

  “I’m close to retiring,” Layton replied while leaning forward to look at Jack. “I don’t keep a regular schedule, plus I have a staff of junior professors and grad students handling most of my academic load. No one’s going to miss me for a couple of days.”

  “Besides,” Angela added. “I’m sure by now Pete’s wondering if Layton knows something. Too many disabled operatives in the area, especially the ones following him last night. It’s probably good for Jonathan, and for us, if he left town for a few days.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “What about us? Where do we go after we drop him off?”

  “Daytona Beach,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Jonathan’s brother is a New York lawyer. He has a beach house there he rarely uses, and where we shouldn’t be disturbed while we work.”

  “Work on what?”

  “On your new suit.”

  Jack turned toward the highway, constantly checking his rearview mirror, having had some time to think about a way back and realizing just how difficult it would be, even if he had a functional suit.

  “Okay, Angie, assuming we can build a new OSS … how are you planning to get me high enough to be able to use it?”

  “That’s the thing, Jack. We think you may not need to go as high. Just enough to achieve the desired trans-dimensional harmonic.”

  Jack thought he remembered hearing something about that when Angela and Layton were scribbling those incomprehensible formulas on the whiteboard.

  “And that’s what I need to work out,” said Layton. “But I require access to MIT resources, including the supercomputers, to run some calculations.”

  The ride to the airport took less than forty minutes, time Angela and Layton spent engaged in a deep discussion of theoretical physics combined with astrophysics and computer engineering. Jack tried to keep up for the first minute but soon gave up as the conversation quickly went beyond his pay grade. Instead, he left them to their discussion on the semiconductor chip embedded in the purple glass and its connection to solar energy while his thoughts drifted to his wife back at home, wondering not just how she was managing in his absence, but how his vanishing was being handled by NASA. After all, the whole world had been watching his jump.

  Jack was pretty damn sure that Hastings and his gurus knew exactly what had taken place, but that didn’t mean that the rest of NASA had figured it out.

  But if someone could, he was certain it would be Angela.

  Following that train of thought, however, it meant that if Angela did indeed suspect that Jack had not burned up on reentry, if she had somehow connected the dots and realized that he had gone someplace else, and tried to go public with it, then she was in obvious danger because Hastings would likely go to any length to protect his secret.

  Which made it so much more imperative that he find a way back.

  Before he knew it, they had reached the airport, and Jack silently chastised himself for having gone on autopilot, immersed in his thoughts while half of Pete’s posse could be right on his tail.

  I need to be more careful, he thought, resuming his scan, once more becoming aware of his surroundings, checking the traffic behind him as he took the exit for the airport. He circled it twice, making sure they were clean, before heading for departures and dropping Layton off by the American Airlines check-in.

  “Let’s touch base in a couple of days,” he said, walking away, briefcase in hand, disappearing beyond the automatic doors.

  Angela once again snuggled against Jack’s arm as he steered the truck back toward the turnpike, hugging his right bicep.

  “So,” he said. “Want to bring me up to speed?”

  “It’s a recording device, Jack,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The chip embedded in the glass token. It not only controlled the type of harmonic required to achieve a jump, it also recorded the event, including your vitals during the entire event, plus the energy levels of the accelerator and the speed of the particles.”

  “Why?”

  “Our best guess is that Hastings and his gurus were using the jump to collect data, to learn, to even understand the physiological effects. That’s why they hid the token in the suit. They wanted to gather information on their miniature particle accelerator while you fell out of the sky. The token became active the moment it was energized by solar gamma rays as you dropped from sixty miles high. And this also explains why Hastings had insisted on Alpha-B, which would have narrowly missed the desired trans-dimensional harmonic, keeping you just on the edge, between worlds, while still providing them with mounds of data in the token’s memory. We think that if your wife had left Alpha-B in the jump profile, per Hastings’s instructions, you would have certainly seen some strange colors around you, like that purple halo, but continued on through a normal reentry, landed as expected, gone home a hero, and never known that the real mission objective was data collection.”

  Jack thought of the roller coaster that had been his life since jumping, and for a moment wished that was the way it had played out. But that would have meant letting Hastings get away with it, and the man had to be stopped.

  “But they never got the data,” he said.

  “Well, we think they did, up to the point that you vanished. The token used an encrypted channel in the TDRSS link to also send telemetry, but not to NASA. So while the folks at Mission Control kept tabs on you through one TDRSS channel, someone else was also following your jump but gathering a different set of parameters through a second, and well-hidden, channel.”

  “Incredible.”

  “And because of the descent profile change, Hastings and his gurus also got a clear signal that their technology works when you achieved the trans-dimensional jump.”

  Jack reached the highway and headed north, toward Daytona Beach.

  “About the suit … how are you planning to build one?”

  She leaned the side of her head against his shoulder while patting him. “Building you a pressure suit isn’t the hardest part. Dago and his guys are already gathering the materials.”

  “Then?”

  “The token was connected to a power source, Jack, and from what we can tell, it wa
s on the underside of that Velcro cover. The residue we found on the token suggests that it was made of the same material as the token but designed to be some sort of solar antenna, to capture gamma rays. The bad news is that we left it behind with the outer shell.”

  “So … my old buddy has it,” he said, checking his rearview mirrors as he accelerated onto the entrance ramp.

  “Yep,” she said. “And we’re going to have to get it back.”

  * * *

  “We’re going to have to get it back in order to put it all together,” Dr. Gayle Horton said, pointing at the display above her microscope. “Here are the connectors where the energy is channeled to the missing component.”

  Pete nodded while staring at what had to be the single most important discovery of the century.

  “What really amazes me,” she continued, “is the energy level of this material. Just to put it in perspective, a liter of regular unleaded gasoline has the energy equivalent of thirty-five kilo joules. The handful of experiments I have conducted so far have yielded the equivalent of thirty million joules. And there’s still plenty of energy stored in it.”

  Pete inhaled deeply, trying to process the orders of magnitude. A joule was the traditional unit of measurement for energy in the metric system, which was the force of one newton acting through one meter. In electrical power terms, one watt was the power of a joule of energy per second.

  He sat back. “This is … unreal. What have you learned about its composition?”

  She grabbed the tablet next to the microscope and browsed through a few graphs. “I’ve confirmed the presence of armalcolite. The full composition is a strange combination of germanium, armalcolite, and dolomite.”

  “Dolomite?” he asked, trying to remember what that was.

  “It’s a crystal that’s used on a number of applications, from furnaces to controlling the pH in saltwater aquariums, but the most interesting one is in particle physics, where detectors can be built under layers of dolomite to enable detection of exotic particles. Dolomite is particularly good at insulating against interference from cosmic rays. In this case it looks like the three compounds fused at an extremely high temperature. I’m firing up one of the furnaces we used to test shuttle tiles to try to reproduce it.”