8.
The couple in front of Will couldn’t get enough of each other, pulling each other closer, her whispering in his ear, him kissing her neck, laughing and watching each other, and being oblivious to the man twenty years older waiting behind them for an Autoveh. They had been at the same bar and were now heading home. Perhaps this was a first date, or perhaps they were a steady thing. They could belong in any number of stories, but Will knew without a doubt their genre was romance. “Windswept and passionate and burning and forever after” sort of stuff.
For a while those passions can blow the sails of love deep into an ocean. But eventually they’ll fade like all dreams. Reality—getting older, some might call it, or gaining wisdom, as others might say—would come, and people would learn that love and passion and desire can’t survive during the storms. So instead of remaining out in the wild tides of a restless sea, most people returned to the safety and security of dry land, casting out their anchors and rolling up their sails.
I’m thinking of sails and storms. Maybe I need to get that Tozer book.
The couple climbed into the car and fell into each other’s arms, laughing that Will was watching their antics. As the door shut and the Autoveh drove away, he looked at the wall of the station that lit up specifically for him. The ads and the video were tailored for him, not by a person but by countless well-tuned machines. The wonderful algorithms of life.
“The search for meaning doesn’t have to take place inside your mind and in the pages of a deep book,” a voice said as it showed a university library and a college student looking overwhelmed. “It can be found in a place full of adventure, in the promise of a grand journey.” Soon the same college student was walking up what appeared to be a mountain somewhere far away, like New Zealand. “Sometimes we don’t need to journey to find what we believe,” the voice said as music began to play in the background. “Sometimes we journey to finally believe in ourselves again.” The classic song “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” played.
The machines literally can see what I’m feeling in my soul. At least that’s how Will sometimes felt.
He could picture Amy’s reaction if he signed up for this “adventure of a lifetime” the ad showed. “Hey, honey, I need to find myself, so I’m heading to New Zealand for a month.” Amy would definitely make him take Flip.
When his Autoveh came, Will entered the car without thought, the destination already known. He had decided to make things easy tonight and take this instead of driving himself. As soon as the voice inside introduced itself, this time in the form of a woman, he interrupted with a curt “I’d like silence, please.” Then he checked his messages on the front dash to see if Amy had replied to his last note. But so far she hadn’t typed a word.
The problem wasn’t that he needed to figure out what he believed. He knew that years ago and had dared to pursue exactly that, believing in himself as he set off for the promise of a grand journey. And for more than ten years, he’d been climbing a steep mountain, and each year the sights appeared a little less beautiful, and breathing became more difficult. For a while it seemed there was no summit in sight. He now wondered if he had not only been hiking up the wrong mountain but had also started in the wrong country.
He thought about the last words Hutchence had said to him: “This is a starting point for you. If you’re interested in continuing to talk and in pursuing something bigger, contact me. I’m not on the network and don’t have a SYNAPSYS, but the info you have will get to me via a third party. Let’s keep talking.”
Perhaps Hutchence was right. Perhaps this wasn’t the end but rather a beginning. Maybe the spark was still lit, just flickering in the dark where it had been stored away.
Maybe there was more work to do and a bigger adventure to come.
FIVE
Bird of Prey
1.
What a ridiculous spectacle.
Stuck and suffocating, Dowland stood beside the glass of the penthouse suite overlooking the dizzying grandeur of Nashville, the center point of celebrities and media that Los Angeles used to be before the earthquake of ’28 hit, which was only four years after the 2024 winter wreaked havoc on the middle of the country and the already-struggling economy. Even though the city had been rebuilding for years, the devastation and decline of LA meant everybody and everything moved to Tennessee. Whenever he came back, he marveled at how alive the metropolis appeared, especially at nighttime. Cities and towns across the United States were cutting back on electricity costs but not Nashville. This city was only getting bigger and brighter.
Dowland thought about the first time he heard about the earthquake a decade ago. He had gotten a call from Kamaria, before they were married, before everybody’s skulls got implanted with chips, before she stopped loving him. Even now, he looked back on that moment not as a foreshadowing but more as a black hole.
“My building just shook for a few minutes. I have to get out of here.”
That’s what Kamaria had said, but at the time he didn’t really hear it because he was in a blackout, living large and blowing off steam as he tried to deal with his new profession, a James Bond kind of life.
“Jon, you need to get here. You need to help me.”
She had been fine, of course, but that wasn’t the point. Later that day, actually in the evening, he woke up in a stranger’s apartment and replayed their conversation. Then Dowland had realized that he had laughed and dismissed Kamaria’s terror. He was too busy, and she would be fine, and he really needed to go, and everything was going to be okay.
Ten years later Los Angeles was a ghost town. Southern California hadn’t been obliterated by a tsunami or by falling into the ocean but rather by a series of natural disasters that had been predicted. The fires came first, worse than anybody could have imagined, propelled by another drought. Emergency crews dealt with people being trapped and carnage everywhere, so when the earthquake came, they were overwhelmed. It was impossible to get out of the city, yet the great exodus occurred. Electricity and water were gone, but since communication was better than ever, the rest of the world watched Los Angeles set ablaze, as if the city were filming the burning of Rome on the largest scale imaginable.
“You need to help me.”
But no. Dowland hadn’t been there for her. Even though he couldn’t physically get to her—that would have been impossible—he could have been there emotionally. He could have lived up to what he told her about how much he loved her. But his drunken antics had taken over, and later on when he was halfway sober again, he retreated in shame. Yet Kamaria let it go, holding up her end of their relationship and their love.
She should have never married me in the first place. She should’ve stayed far, far away.
Los Angeles resembled their relationship in many ways. Along with the aftershocks that continued to shake the city for days, fires seemed to rage for months. So many buildings couldn’t be saved and were left empty afterward. No water was left, so it wasn’t a question of whether people would leave the city but how quickly. The cost to repair everything was too huge, and even though efforts had been made locally and globally with all the political rhetoric and celebrity nonsense, Los Angeles was left on life support after the earthquake.
He heard the heels walking from the bedroom and through the kitchen. Stella had dressed and looked as beautiful as ever.
“Want me to stick around?” she asked.
Dowland shook his head and then leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. He knew she didn’t want to stick around. She liked him enough to drop everything whenever he contacted her to say he was in town. Stella even joked that she was his Nashville girlfriend, which in some ways was true. “Yeah, but you don’t have to pay girlfriends an hourly rate,” he had told her. “Oh yes you do,” she had said. “Only you pay them a lot more, and you don’t always know exactly what you’re going to get.”
&nb
sp; That’s why he liked Stella: she was smart. And with him she was honest and always had been. She hadn’t minded when Dowland had talked about Kamaria, both when they were married and after they got divorced. He didn’t like talking about Kam to other women, but sometimes the drinking loosened his tongue.
“You seem more tense than usual,” Stella said as she slipped on her long overcoat.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t have to leave.” Blue eyes lingered on him, still young enough not to have let the world erase the tenderness inside them.
“You need to find a good man to take you away from guys like me.”
“Then I’d need to move to another city,” she said, flipping her blond hair over her shoulder. “I don’t think there are any left in Nashville. At least any that aren’t taken.”
“Are you busy tomorrow?” Dowland asked.
“I don’t have to be.”
He wasn’t even sure what day tomorrow would be.
“Maybe I’ll call.”
She grinned and traced the scar on his right jaw with her finger. “Maybe I’ll answer.”
She left without saying anything else. They never said hello or goodbye. Rather, it was like this. Every time. And Dowland always knew what to expect.
With the door shut he knew he would be alone again, feeling this restlessness inside, wishing he could take some of the energy from the city below and plug it into his soul. He wanted some of the life out there, some of the bright lights to illuminate the darkness inside him.
Dowland had flown from Miami to Nashville to pursue the most promising lead Sergei had found on Reckoner. Lots of the leads he had uncovered had gone nowhere, and some in fact had been deliberate decoys and dead ends. Fortunately, Sergei knew how to tease out the wandering leads going nowhere. Tomorrow Dowland would pay a nice little surprise visit to whoever was using Reckoner’s name off the network grid.
After finishing the bottle of ridiculously overpriced vodka, he found himself scrolling through all the photos of Kamaria and him. Thousands he hadn’t dumped off his SYNAPSYS. Each picture stung a bit, and each minute of the night somehow turned into smoke. His memories of her weren’t chronological—or logical, for that matter. They were random bursts of information. He saw a picture of their trip to Greece and then a picture of the time he decided to tell her what he really did and shared it with her by joking about it. There was the quote from the Bond movie with Daniel Craig—he couldn’t remember which one—where he was asked about his occupation, and his reply was classic.
“That’s not the sort of thing that looks good on a form,” Bond said.
“And why is that?”
“I kill people.”
Kamaria, naturally, hadn’t taken this revelation very well. She had been scared at first, but eventually she learned to accept it. Like overlooking his selfish response to the earthquake, she had also chosen to accept his job, even though Dowland knew she was actually in denial.
The more photos he looked at and the more he drank, the closer he drew to the inevitable. He was in her city, so how could he not? The teeny, tiny voice of reason that still was somewhere inside him was lost at sea and couldn’t be heard over the waves. He decided to contact Kamaria. To at least let her know he wasn’t far away.
“Kam,” he said. Then he heard the ding for his message to start. “It’s me. I know I shouldn’t…but I am. I’m in Nashville. For work.”
He paused for a minute, looking out the glass again, wondering where she might be. “I have a job. One of those ‘one more job is all I need and that’s it’ sort of jobs. Financially I’ll be set.”
Do I sound drunk? Is my voice slurring?
Of course she could tell. He didn’t even have to say anything, and she would have known.
“There’s still a chance, Kam. I can change. We can change. We were a good thing—I know that. The way I felt around you. Nothing’s ever made me feel more alive. And right now this world’s oppressive. It’s everything and anything, and right now it’s ultimately nothing.”
He wasn’t making sense, and he wasn’t quite sure what his point was other than telling her he wanted to see her. That he wanted her.
“Come find me. I’m at the Spire. I’m just…It’d be good to talk. Just come up here. Top floor as always. Just like James Bond.”
That was an attempt at a joke, but she had stopped laughing at those a long time ago. Maybe one day he’d make her laugh again. The very thought of it made him laugh too, even though he had no idea why.
2.
Half-conscious, Dowland didn’t feel the two hands yank him out of bed, but he did feel the carpeted floor when he fell face-first. Without thinking, only reacting, he turned over and reached to his side for his Beretta but instead felt his boxer shorts. Opening his eyes, he saw the body standing over him, the face looking down. A hand gripped his throat, the grip so strong it both choked him and lifted him up, forcing him against the wall.
As Dowland curled his fist and tried to gain his balance, sharp metal jutted into the right side of his throat.
“This twelve-inch blade is sharp enough to cut both your jugular veins and your carotid arteries. So do not move.”
The voice, husky and controlled, didn’t sound familiar. That didn’t mean anything, not to Dowland. He knew he had plenty of enemies out there, a lot he had never met or heard in person.
“Turn on the light so you can see me,” the man said, keeping the knife against Dowland as he stepped over to the nearest light.
The assailant was several inches taller than Dowland, who was six foot one, and he looked like solid muscle. Not overblown to look impressive but the kind who could really hurt another man. The square face and expressionless eyes looked at him. He was in a custom-fitted two-piece suit, with the barrel of a gun sticking out above his belt.
“I’m going to tell you this once, okay?” the man said. “And I don’t care who you are and who you work for and what you do. You got that? You might work for someone powerful, but so do I. The kind you don’t want to mess with.”
Dowland refrained from laughing as he normally might, his head still swimming in alcohol. You have no clue, buddy.
“These late-night calls to Kamaria, the messages for her to call you back, for her to see you, for her to pay attention—these are officially stopping tonight.”
So that’s what this is about. Examining the man with this new bit of information in mind, Dowland assessed what relationship the attacker might have to Kam. Hired hand? Bodyguard? No. He’s the boyfriend.
Kamaria always had a thing for strong, dangerous men. The more alpha, the better. That was one reason she had been with him and why she had stayed as long as she did. He didn’t look like a wrestling champion as this buzz-cut machine did. But he wasn’t exactly the cuddly type either.
“How’d you get in here?” Dowland asked.
“I wouldn’t worry about that. I’d worry more about whether you’ll see the sun come up over our wonderful city.”
Dowland had regained his clarity. With the man a few feet away, holding the knife out but no longer against his skin, he surveyed whether he could act. No way I can without being cut, even just a little.
“You do anything to me, and you’re a dead man,” Dowland said.
“Don’t threaten me. She told me not to believe any of your drunken lies.”
“I’m not the threat here.”
The man pressed the blade against him, this time slicing the skin above his abdomen. Square-Jaw leaned over to share his hot, peppermint breath up close. “You’re weak, and you prey on helpless people. Like Kamaria. But I’m not like them.”
Dowland could feel the blade inches into his gut. He gritted his teeth, not backing away from the man. “The next time I see her, I’ll tell her you feel this way.”
The guy cursed, then whipped th
e knife toward his ear, the blade burning through it.
Dowland shouted and cupped it, feeling blood on his palm.
“You leave this city and never set foot in it again,” the man said. “You never contact Kamaria again. If you do either of them, I’ll be back with my blade. And the next time I’ll cut off more than your earlobe.”
As the assailant walked away, Dowland first scanned the room, then realized his handgun was tucked away where he always hid it in a hotel room: underneath his bed. For a moment he thought about getting it, but he knew Kam’s boyfriend had one too. The last thing he needed was a shoot-out in the penthouse suite. Publicity like that was frowned upon, even if he had jurisdiction with the local cops and could get them to go away.
Feeling dizzy and still holding his cut ear, he heard the sound of alarm from Alfred: “Sir, you are experiencing dramatic blood loss due to the removal of your lobule on your left auricle.” His SYNAPSYS spoke in an English accent like an elderly butler, like the kind Batman had.
“My lobule on my what?” Dowland asked, taking a look at his right hand and seeing it drenched in blood.
Then he looked on the floor and saw what Alfred was talking about. His cleanly cut earlobe lay on the carpet right by his feet. Dowland cursed, shaking his head, and reconsidered grabbing his Beretta.
Not now. Just wait.
Square-Jaw had just signed his death certificate. He had no idea. For the moment Dowland needed to find a towel to stop the bleeding. Then he needed to find someone who could stitch his earlobe back in place.
3.
After the doctor who couldn’t speak English left with her medic android, who translated for her, Dowland sat on the couch with a cup of coffee mixed with rum from the room’s wet bar. The bottom half of his ear was secure in its black bandage that protected the work the robot had done. The wound wasn’t deadly, of course, but he needed some instant plastic surgery. The doctor told him in Vietnamese that they couldn’t simply sew the earlobe back on, but they would recreate one with on-the-spot plastic surgery, the sort they did for the wealthy and famous who didn’t want to leave their homes and possibly be seen having the work done. Dowland just needed to keep the bandage on for a few days to make sure half his ear wouldn’t fall off.
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