by Taiyo Fujii
“Glad to see you back to your old self. You had me worried, just lying around for so long.”
Friday pointed at the television on the wall. Ozzy noticed the date on the news. “The fifteenth?!” he exclaimed in surprise.
“Yes, two days since that phone call.”
“Two whole days … ?”
After being questioned via video call by the two CIA agents calling themselves Bruce and Chris, Ozzy had taken to his bed. He then seemed to have spent two days lying there listlessly. The fear that all of his actions were under surveillance had been too much for him.
“Did you know Bruce called me once more after that? ‘Tell Mr. Cunningham the truth,’ he said. Apparently they don’t want liars mixed up with this. They know everything at the CIA, eh?”
“The truth?”
“Do you remember that I am from Somalia?”
“Now that you mention it …”
Friday told Ozzy his story. Arriving in France as a refugee from the endless Somali Civil War, he had entered university and graduated with a degree in astronomy but had been unable to find work. Upon his dejected return to his home country, his education saw him raised to a position of authority within his incessantly warring tribe. He had been searching for a way to escape this illegal lifestyle when he found a billionaire who planned to live alone on a remote island: Ozzy.
“Somalia … ? Were you a pirate or something?”
“Something along those lines. But please believe me: I chose to work here because you offered me free use of the telescope. Anyway, I’m glad to see you back to your old self. It must have been the fish.”
“I don’t want any damn fish. I hate fish! Tentacles too!”
Ozzy rose to his feet and headed for the large freezer in one corner of the kitchen. Two months’ worth of hot dogs were stored inside. His intricately planned dining schedule could not be left to the capricious likes of Friday.
“Oh, that’s right,” Friday said. “As you instructed, I have continued to track the Rod from God. Since yesterday it has been moving somewhat mysteriously. Shall I put it up on the tele—”
“Forget it!” Ozzy spun around from the open freezer, silver-colored package in one hand. “Just forget it. Forget that damn Rod from God ever existed!”
“Are you sure?”
“Why should I care about that thing? It’s the reason I’m under CIA surveillance.”
“What about your friends?”
“My friends?”
“Ronnie and Judy Smark,” Friday explained, a look of concern on his face. “They are your friends, no? They are the target of the Rod from God.”
“What?!” An icy tingle ran down Ozzy’s spine, and it wasn’t just the cold air from the freezer. No way. That was ridiculous. The Rod from God was a bald-faced lie and Ozzy knew it; he had been the one who’d made it up.
“It’s been on the news all day. Would you like to see a recording?”
Friday pressed a button on the remote control and Ozzy heard a familiar voice from his past come from the television on the wall. Ozzy spun to look at the screen. There was Ronnie floating in midair. He pushed Judy forward and was sent flying backwards into the wall by the reaction. That unshaven chin, those glaring eyes, brought back memories. And how about Judy, staring at the camera without any sign of fear? Ozzy hadn’t seen her since she was a little girl.
“Very impressive, isn’t it?” said Friday. “One wouldn’t expect anything less from Ronnie Smark, of course.”
Ozzy grunted noncommittally. On the screen, he noticed Ronnie’s left eye trembling as he tried to wink. Ozzy remembered that tic. He had seen it back when Ronnie was still based in Ozzy’s warehouse, his settlement service just starting to take off. It was the day he had deleted all the accounts the Mafia used to deal drugs. Fearing reprisals, his staff had convinced Ronnie to have Ozzy put him up in Ozzy’s top-floor apartment. Ronnie had offered the same wink as today as he apologized cheerfully for the imposition. But the things he groaned in his sleep kept Ozzy awake all night.
Ozzy shivered as the cold air crawled up his arms. He realized that he had sat down at some point. His hands were on the floor, a package of hot dogs squashed under one palm.
“Mr. Cunningham, you’ll hurt your knee. Oof!”
Feeling Friday’s strong, warm shoulder pushing into his armpit, Ozzy struggled to his feet, still swaying. The sandals had slipped off his feet. He stepped on the hot dog package, sending a spurt of thawed ketchup across the floor.
If the Rod from God hit the orbital hotel, would Ronnie’s blood spread like that? Or would it be more like a freeze-dried red mist? No. Nothing of the sort was going to happen. The Rod from God was a fantasy.
Ozzy looked up to see Judy giving him the finger, glaring defiantly from the television screen. He’d often played with her as a child when Ronnie was too busy. She’d had the same powerful gaze back then, too.
“Mr. Cunningham. Mr. Cunningham!” Friday sighed. “I must clean the floor. Could I ask you to move?”
Friday bore Ozzy up with his shoulder again and helped him to his desk. The Aeron chair creaked as Ozzy worked his behind into it.
Ozzy scowled at the list of notifications on his screen. He was receiving a video-call request at that very moment. Who could that be, at this time of night? Without thinking, he hit the key to open a new window.
He heard the sound of the connection being established. Visual noise flooded the screen and, when he recognized it, gave him goose bumps.
The CIA. They had to be using an encrypted line. Those bastards. Ozzy’s terror turned to rage. They were listening to everything he said to the outside world, but they kept their own damn calls private.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“Are we … are bothering you?” The voice that came from the speakers was unfamiliar, its English less than fluent.
The noise began to clear up. Ozzy saw a young Asian man, solicitous in both expression and bearing, sitting before a silvery wall.
“Mr. Cunningham, nice to, uh, video meet you. I am Kazumi, owner of Meteor News. Do you remember me?”
“Kazumi … How— Ah, forget it. The CIA, right? You got my details from them?”
“Yes. I’m using a CIA line to speak with you.”
A woman with a shaved head sat to Kazumi’s right, a dark-complexioned man with impressively bushy eyebrows to his left. All of them were staring directly at Ozzy through the camera. He was just thinking how young they all looked when a woman he recognized stepped into frame behind them.
“Haven’t seen you for two days, Mr. Cunningham. It’s Chris. Remember me?”
Ozzy glared at the camera. Bruce, the black guy, had been the one who had actually interrogated him. But this woman had been the one who had hinted that they knew about his estranged wife—that they were listening in on everything he said.
“No need to go on the defensive,” Chris said. “Today we want to ask you a favor. Can we borrow your Sampson-5?”
Kazumi leaned closer to the camera. “Mr. Cunningham, we would truly appreciate it. Please lend us the radar you use for observations.”
Ozzy tried to gather his thoughts. “What’s this about?”
“We are tracking spacecraft called space tethers. We need your radar to make observations.” Kazumi explained that these space tethers had been responsible for the unnatural motion of SAFIR 3’s second stage that Ozzy had observed.
Most of what Kazumi said was beyond Ozzy’s understanding, but the gist was clear enough: Kazumi wanted to prove that the Rod from God was nonsense, and to do that, he had to observe the space tethers in action.
“Sounds pretty crazy to me. Space tethers? Never heard of them.”
“Of course not. I was the one who discovered them in your observational data.”
“My what? Oh, you mean that data I post
ed to the blog. You read that?” The observational data from Sampson-5 was incomprehensible even to Ozzy. He had only included it to lend his news post some scientific gravitas.
“Please, Mr. Cunningham. Let us borrow your radar. Let us save Ronnie Smark and his daughter in that orbital hotel.”
Kazumi’s words caught in Ozzy’s chest. Ozzy had been responsible for starting the wild rumors that had Ronnie scared. But now Kazumi was saying that there was a real threat too—something else, something unknown, something he wanted to pin down and reveal to the world.
Saving Ronnie. Ozzy had no objection to that. He was on the verge of agreeing to the request when Chris spoke, standing with her hand on Kazumi’s shoulder.
“Do you understand the situation? You just need to let us log in to your control system, and we’ll take it from there. We’ll even pay you for the time we use. You don’t need to be at the controls. Just take your hands off them for a while.”
Ozzy looked down at his fat, round fingers. Sit there doing nothing? While Kazumi and the others were saving Ronnie? “You’re saying I should just back off?”
“That’s right. Just lend us the equipment. That’s all we need.”
“That’s not gonna work for me.”
“Cunningham! Do you realize what you’re getting yourself into here? Lend us your damn radar, or I’ll requisition it by force.”
“I’d like to see you try. I’m in the middle of the Indian Ocean, half a world away.”
Even through the video link, he saw Chris’s eyes narrow.
Kazumi brushed Chris’s hand off his shoulder.
“Chris, we cannot just ignore what Ozzy has to say,” he said, then turned his eyes back to the camera. “We want to save Ronnie Smark, Mr. Cunningham. Are you opposed to that?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The jerk’s my best friend. Of course I want to save him.”
“Then let us do it together.”
Ozzy took a deep breath.
“What do you want from us, Mr. Cunningham?” Kazumi continued. He moved closer to the camera, face looming larger on Ozzy’s screen. “I am serious about unraveling the riddle of the space tether. I want to save the orbital hotel and the Smarks too.” His jet-black eyes looked directly into Ozzy’s own.
“What do I want from you? Well … uh …”
“Let me make you an offer, then. Part ownership of Meteor News.”
Ozzy’s eyes widened at this proposition, completely unexpected though not unlike others he had heard many times before. At the other end of the video link, the two people on either side of Kazumi looked at him with startled expressions as well.
Eyebrows on the left grabbed Kazumi by the arm and tried to pull him back into his seat. “Kazumi, what are you saying?” he said. “You don’t need to do that.”
“No, I want Mr. Cunningham involved too. And I do not have anything else to offer him.”
A deep nostalgia welled up within Ozzy. Would-be entrepreneurs, going from door to door with stock in hand. Tickets to a shared adventure fanned out before him.
“All right. You’re offering me stock? I’ll take it. Forty-nine percent, okay?”
“Cunningham!” Eyebrows pounded the table.
“Don’t misunderstand me. This is how I buy in to your mission. I’m a stakeholder now. As co-owner of Meteor News, it concerns me directly, right? So … call me Ozzy, already.” He grabbed Friday by the arm and pulled him into the frame. “This is my radar operator, Fri—uh, Johansson. If you have any questions about the Sampson-5, he’s your man. At your service whenever you need him, whatever you need him for.”
“Thank you, Mr. Cunningham.”
“I told you. Call me Ozzy.”
Kazumi’s face crumpled for a moment, then broke into a smile. That was it. Ozzy hadn’t seen an expression like that in a long time. Now he just wanted to see that smile on Ronnie’s face again.
“Thanks … Ozzy,” said Kazumi.
Tue, 15 Dec 2020 08:25 -0800 (2020-12-15T16:25 GMT)
Western Days Hotel, Seattle
“Chris, sorry to keep you—whoa! What’s all this about?”
The silvery gleam that filled the penthouse suite left Bruce lost for words as he stepped inside. Wrinkled silver picnic mats had been stapled all over the walls. On closer examination, he saw that each sheet had strands of Nichrome wire running across it. The effect was indescribably odd after walking through the chicly appointed lobby and elevator hall outside.
“Bruce! You’re early,” said Chris, just beside him. She was making use of the room’s original furnishings, sitting at a mahogany desk in a leather president’s chair as she worked on her laptop. Bruce frowned, noticing that her computer didn’t have a LAN cable plugged into it.
“Chris, what are you doing? You know that’s against regulations.”
“You mean the Wi-Fi? It’s fine. This room is now an anechoic chamber.” Chris swept her arm grandly, indicating the silvered walls and ceiling.
“The picnic mats? That’s what they’re for?”
“I had Daryl check how good the shielding was. Apparently the mats and Nichrome wire together create a darkroom that’s completely impenetrable to Wi-Fi and cell phone signals.”
Their operations center used dozens of Wi-Fi devices, and the shielding was to conceal their presence, she explained. The idea had come from Akari, the engineer who’d come along with Kazumi.
“We’ve gone full Geek House, then.” Bruce pulled his emergency BlackBerry from its belt case and checked the signal strength. “BlackBerry’s getting a signal,” he observed.
“Look more closely,” Chris said, gesturing toward the window with her chin.
A cell phone base station antenna! Chris explained that Daryl had been sent out to buy it. The store they’d visited earlier had carried them, but such equipment was normally raised on a pole and used on farms. Laying it on the floor inside was not an idea a normal person would have come up with.
“Akari had him run a wire out to the terrace this morning.”
“I see,” Bruce said after a beat.
He looked around the room more closely. The silver mats covering the walls caught the eye first, but the objects piled up on the floor were not your usual office equipment either. In the middle of the room was an oval table with a screwed-on monitor arm put together from aluminized steel. A ring of office chairs around the table completed the setup. This was standard enough for a field operations center.
But what was that mountain of tiny integrated circuits that lay on the other side of the table, plugged into LAN cables as thick as arteries? He could see from the twinkling LEDs that it was operational, but if this had been a movie, some kind of computer monster would be leaping out of that tangle of chips and cables at any moment.
“That knot of silicon is analyzing the observational data from Cunningham’s radar,” Chris said. “Apparently the space tether cluster is over Desnoeufs as we speak.”
“Raspberry Pis, huh? I’m always hearing how cheap and useful they are, but I’ve never seen an army of them at work like this.”
A fat power cable snaked into the room through the silver-covered window that looked out on to the terrace. Bruce listened closely. They were on the seventh floor, so that nearby engine noise had to be …
“She brought a generator in too? Big believer in DIY, huh?”
“Well, she’s in the US now. Land of the garage workshop. When in Rome.”
“If the problem is money—” Bruce said, but stopped when he saw the warning in Chris’s eyes. She glanced over toward a whiteboard. Bruce followed her gaze to see a slender arm reach up from behind it with an interior designer’s stapler and begin attaching a silver mat to the ceiling.
Chris lowered her voice. “Who cares if it’s homemade as long as it works? We don’t want to demotivate her.”
There was the
sound of someone jumping off a stepladder. A moment later, a small woman with a buzz cut wearing some kind of high-tech eyewear popped out from behind the whiteboard.
“That’s Akari,” Chris said.
Bruce composed his features into a smile. “Akari!” he said, offering her his hand. “Name’s Bruce. Wish I could show your work to some of my colleagues. You sure you’re not overdoing it, though?”
“Overdoing it? No way. Anything we can do, they can do also. We need a sword and a shield both. Am I wrong?”
Her English was stiff, but her boyish face looked relaxed. If she could talk with so little reserve to people she’d just met, she’d be communicating fluently in no time.
“No, you’re right,” Bruce said. “Welcome to the team.” He shook her delicate hand, noticing the special-ops keyboard strapped to her other wrist.
“Bruce, you’ll be Akari’s support,” Chris said.
Bruce nodded. He had no objection. He’d received the same orders last night, and watching a civilian hacker at work would be educational.
“You heard the lady, Akari,” he said. “What do you need me to do first?”
“Go shopping,” Akari replied. She spread her arms and twirled on the spot. “I didn’t realize the room would be this … wide. There aren’t enough picnic sheets.”
It was true that only half of the ceiling had been covered, and expensive-looking fabric wallpaper could still be seen in places between the mats near the door. Bruce’s eyes went wide when he realized what he was seeing. There was real embroidery on that wallpaper! It must have cost thirty dollars a square foot. And Akari was stapling picnic mats to it.
“Also, I want to put a security camera outside the door,” Akari said. “Can you buy one of those too? A small one.”
Chris patted Bruce’s shoulder. “I’ve got a favor to ask, too,” she said. “This, uh, redecorating—can you talk to the hotel about it, see what they want to let it pass? Just think of it as start-up costs for the team and it’ll feel like a bargain.”
“No problem. What about Daryl? I don’t see Kazumi anywhere, either.”