They burst out onto the open water and Ethan looked left and right. A flash of gray metal caught his eye to his right, and he shouted a warning to Bryson as he saw the other airboat launch toward them from where it had been waiting in ambush. Bryson span the wheel and the airboat’s hull shuddered as it turned hard, but he wasn’t quick enough to prevent the bow of the second boat ramming into their stern.
Ethan was hurled sideways under the impact and tumbled across the deck as the airboat beside them accelerated away, trailing a thin plume of white smoke. A clatter of machine-gun fire rattled off the decks, showering Ethan in sparks as he ducked his head down low.
To his right, Lopez rolled alongside him and let her rifle fall onto his back, using his body as a rest. Ethan remained still as she took aim and opened fire on the fleeing airboat. Four rounds cracked out, and Ethan saw at least two of them send sparks flying from the airboat’s propeller.
Bryson shoved the throttles fully forward and they surged in pursuit.
‘He’s lighter than us,’ Lopez guessed. ‘Only one man aboard! We can’t pass him.’
Ethan was about to reply when the big blond man looked over his shoulder and tossed something up in the air. The small black object span as it climbed and then arced down toward their airboat.
‘Grenade!’
Bryson yelled the warning as he swerved the airboat aside. The craft heaved and bounced across the wake of their quarry as the grenade hit the water nearby and exploded in a towering column of white water that splashed across the deck. Ethan and Lopez ducked as a hail of supersonic shrapnel sliced through the air around them, pinging off the hull and the propeller cage in a deafening metallic ricochet.
‘Just get us as close to him as you can!’ Ethan yelled at Bryson.
Bryson wrenched the airboat back under control and turned back toward their quarry as Ethan shouted at Lopez.
‘Covering fire! Keep that bastard’s head down!’ Lopez responded instantly and took up a prone position on her belly in the bow of the airboat. She took aim and fired three rounds in quick succession, the wind whipping the sound of the shots away. Through the spray Ethan saw the big blond man flinch and duck his head down.
Ethan crept forward onto the port bow, staying clear of Lopez’s rifle as he prepared to make the jump.
‘You can’t take him on your own!’ Lopez shouted. ‘We already tried that. Just let me take out the engine!’
‘No!’ Ethan shouted as a plan formed in his mind. ‘I’ve had an idea!’
Lopez looked up at him from behind the scope of her rifle but Ethan didn’t elaborate. His idea wasn’t without risk, and this wasn’t the time for debate. The big blond man had realized that they were almost alongside him, and in an act of desperation he did the last thing that Ethan had expected him to.
He yanked the airboat across their path, the hull banking steeply in front of them until they could see deep inside as they rushed toward it on a collision course.
43
The airboat slid broadside amidst a wall of churning white water, its spinning propeller spraying a vortex of water vapor onto the hot air, and Ethan realized that there was no way that they could avoid smashing into it.
Bryson yelled out in alarm as he desperately tried to turn the airboat away from the impending collision. Ethan threw himself down again onto the deck as the bow of their airboat crashed into their opponent’s hull in a whining crescendo of clashing metal. Ethan felt the airboat mount the bow of the boat below them, screech across it and crash down onto the water on the other side.
Ethan rolled over in time to see the big blond man kneeling in his violently rocking boat, his rifle pulled into his shoulder. A fearsome blast of automatic fire smashed into their engine, the huge propeller blades shattering to clatter against the inside of the cage as a dense pall of oily black smoke spilled from the engine block.
The blond man reached down and threw the throttles of his airboat forward, the craft surging forward past them. Two words passed unbidden through Ethan’s mind.
Semper fi. The motto of the United States Marines. Always loyal.
Ethan scrambled to his feet and sprinted across the rocking deck of the airboat. He leapt into the air as the blond man’s airboat thundered by, arms outstretched for the one place where the killer could not fire. The cage around his own engine.
Ethan hit the huge cage with a deep thump that reverberated through his chest as he landed. His fingers ached as they grasped the metal wires and the windblast from the blades pummeled his chest.
The airboat accelerated across the water, the vibrations from the engine shuddering through Ethan’s bones as he struggled to maintain his grip on the cage. The blond man sitting in the pilot’s seat could not fire through the blades at Ethan for fear of destroying his own craft, and the metal cage prevented him from reaching around it with his rifle to shoot Ethan off. The killer instead aimed his airboat at a dense bank of towering sawgrass.
Ethan braced himself as the blond man turned the vessel, sweeping along the edge of the reed banks. Thick blades slapped and sliced across the rear of the airboat, scraping painfully across Ethan’s face and tearing at his shirt, but he held on grimly as the airboat soared back into open water.
Ethan reached up and hauled himself onto the top of the cage, the wind and spray stinging his eyes. As the blond man looked over his shoulder to see if he had dislodged him, Ethan hurled himself down onto the killer’s broad shoulders.
The impact felt as though Ethan had hurled himself against a tree. The blond man roared as he was propelled forward to fall flat onto his face against the seats in the boat’s hull. Ethan tumbled over him and rolled into the bow alongside the camera that he sought. He grabbed it with both hands and scrambled to his feet just as the killer rushed toward him with huge hands outstretched.
Ethan ducked down beneath the giant arms and barged his shoulder deep into the man’s belly, spinning him aside to topple onto the deck as Ethan made a grab with his free hand for the M-16 propped alongside the driver’s seat. He grabbed the butt and turned as he let the weapon slide down through his hand until his finger slipped onto the trigger. He took aim.
The blond man’s fist smashed the barrel aside even as Ethan squeezed the trigger. The weapon stuttered as it fired and the barrel flew up into the air from the recoil. Another chunky fist flashed toward Ethan’s face and he ducked his head down, letting the solid bone of his skull take the full impact of the blow. He heard the blond man howl in pain as his knuckles crunched across the top of Ethan’s head, but the huge force of the punch sent Ethan reeling across the boat. He collided with the row of seats and sprawled onto the rolling deck. The camera was pinned beneath him and dug painfully into his ribs as the M-16 span from his grasp and clattered out of reach.
He crawled onto his hands and knees and reached out for the weapon, only to see a heavy boot swing upwards to thump squarely across his chest. Ethan gasped as his lungs convulsed and he was flipped over onto his back, his hands wrapped around the camera. The killer reached down and picked up the M-16, looming over Ethan against the blue sky and aiming the rifle down at him. The blond man’s angular features contorted into a malicious grin and his eyes shone with hatred.
One thick finger curled around the trigger and squeezed.
A flash of green reeds blasted into Ethan’s field of view as a crash of rending metal screeched in his ears. The M-16 flew high in the killer’s grasp, the shot smacking through the hull inches from Ethan’s head as the man was hurled forward through the air over Ethan’s body. Ethan curled up into a fetal ball as the airboat slammed into dense coils of mangroves and launched itself clear of the water. Ethan felt himself float briefly in mid-air before the airboat slammed bow-first into a thick bank of trees. Ethan hit the deck hard and cracked the back of his skull as he flew toward the bow and was hurled out of the boat.
He saw the world spin and then the ground rush up at him in a blur. On instinct he threw his hands out to break his fal
l and the camera span from his grasp. He hit the foliage with a tremendous impact that blasted the air from his lungs and sent spots of light spiraling across his vision. He rolled twice across the hard and unforgiving ground and slumped to a halt against the gnarled trunk of a tree.
For several moments he lay unable to move, his lungs devoid of air, his limbs numb and his vision blurred into a haze of disconnected whorls of color. Somehow he managed to suck in a lungful of air, and his sight sparkled and returned. The sound of crackling flames entered the battered field of his consciousness, and he turned to see the buckled wreckage of the airboat crunched up against a thicket of trees, black smoke and flame spitting from its ruined engine.
Ethan struggled to focus and looked to his left just in time to see the big blond man run into the dense forests nearby with the camera tucked beneath his arm. Ethan reached out to haul himself up alongside the tree he had fallen against, but bolts of agony shot across his shoulder and he slumped back down again.
‘Damn.’
Ethan lay on the bank for almost twenty minutes until he saw Bryson and Lopez paddling their crippled airboat up the creek toward him, homing in on the spiraling pillar of dirty smoke that stained the bright blue sky above.
Bryson guided the airboat in to the shore as Lopez hopped off the edge of the deck and rushed to Ethan’s side.
‘You didn’t get the camera,’ she observed.
Ethan struggled to his feet as he massaged his shoulder. ‘I’m fine, thanks for asking.’
‘Were you hit?’ she asked, looking at his arm.
‘Not by bullets,’ Ethan replied, ‘but just about everything else.’
Bryson called across to him. ‘Speak for your goddamned self.’
Ethan saw a roughly applied tourniquet adorning Bryson’s left forearm, where either a bullet or shrapnel had grazed him.
‘Jarvis is on his way with the police,’ Lopez said. ‘I called him the moment you took off.’
Ethan nodded.
‘Good work. We need to get back to Canaveral,’ he pointed out as he turned to Bryson. ‘And we need to search that spit of land where Charles Purcell died. He just sacrificed his life to find justice.’
44
FLORIDA EVERGLADES
June 28: 16.04
‘Just what are we supposed to be looking for?’
Captain Kyle Sears looked expectantly at Doug Jarvis, who in turn looked at Ethan. Nearby, two uniforms guarded the spot where Charles Purcell had died, while other officers scoured the forest in pairs. A flotilla of police airboats were moored side by side on the surface of the water nearby.
‘Bullet casings,’ Ethan replied. ‘Treat any that you find as forensic evidence. Have them bagged and sealed and sent to the nearest suitable lab for analysis. If I’m right, or rather if our victim was right, they’ll have traces of Rubidium-82 on the surface.’
Kyle Sears squinted at Jarvis.
‘Why the hell didn’t you call us in to provide backup?’ he demanded.
‘Same reasons as before,’ Jarvis replied. ‘This is too sensitive for local law enforcement.’ Jarvis turned to Ethan. ‘What happened?’
‘We got jumped, same guy who killed Macy at the courthouse.’
‘Any leads from Purcell before he died?’ the old man asked.
Ethan explained what Purcell had related to them; the details held on the camera, the future that he had seen, and IRIS’s implication in his family’s murder. Jarvis remained silent for a long moment after Ethan had finished speaking.
‘So he gave his life to keep the investigation on track,’ Jarvis replied.
‘He’d already lost everything,’ Ethan replied pragmatically, then regretted it. ‘But he was a hero, and we should ensure he’s remembered that way. What I don’t get is why he wouldn’t tell us where the copies of the documents he stole from IRIS were.’
‘He knew he was about to be killed,’ Lopez said. ‘My guess is that he couldn’t tell us for fear of letting his assassin know. You saw the way he was looking around.’
‘This camera,’ Jarvis said, ‘you say that its hard drive holds the record of six months’ future events?’
‘As seen through its own lens, starting at a secret complex supposedly built by IRIS,’ Lopez nodded. ‘Doesn’t matter now where the camera goes or where it’s pointed. It’s already seen the future while in the black-hole chamber and recorded everything to the drive.’
Ethan could see the old man’s eyes sparkling with intrigue, and realized that he was already entertaining the prospect of acquiring the camera and its uniquely valuable record for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
‘We have to stop Joaquin Abell,’ Lopez said, sensing the same as Ethan. ‘He’s got a game plan and this is only the beginning of what he intends to do. The camera can wait – it’s only of secondary importance to shutting IRIS down.’
‘That camera,’ Jarvis replied, ‘could save all of our butts. I’m down here trying to persuade the powers that be to continue funding our investigations, and not for the first time the two of you are at the epicenter of gunfights, accidents and general mayhem. I’ll be lucky if I have a job when I get back to the district. But if this technology were to be acquired by us then the DIA would change their tune overnight.’
Ethan smiled, the pain in his shoulder momentarily forgotten.
‘Then you’ll be relieved that I let our attacker get away with the camera.’
Jarvis’s eyes widened as he stared at Ethan. ‘You let him get away?!’
‘Bryson took a bullet so that you could let him get away,’ Lopez snapped. ‘What the hell were you thinking? Why chase him in the first place?’
Ethan raised a placating hand at her.
‘Look, right up to this moment we’ve been one step behind, all the time. If Joaquin Abell really can see future news reports then he’s had us by the balls ever since we got here. Everything we do is only a reaction to what he has already anticipated and acted upon.’
‘So?’ Jarvis asked.
‘So, that all changed the moment we met Charles Purcell,’ Ethan explained. ‘He said it himself – only he has seen the future as it will unfold over the next twenty-four hours. Joaquin only sees news reports from the future, and uses what he sees for his own ends. But Charles Purcell took a camera outside of the IRIS facility, out into the world. It would have already seen our conversation with Purcell, and its being stolen by that assassin; it would have seen everything that occurs into the future for six months, with absolute clarity, with regard to this very case.’
‘Effectively, the camera’s hard drive carries a record of everything that the camera will see for the next few months,’ Lopez explained. ‘But because it was taken away from the facility, what it’s seen is potentially different from what Joaquin’s cameras may have witnessed.’
‘Because of the observer effect,’ Jarvis said. ‘In principle, the events in the future that the camera saw are now fixed, but only for that camera.’
Kyle Sears furrowed his brow.
‘So you’re saying that one future vision trumps another, somehow?’
‘No,’ Ethan said. ‘Only that I think Purcell was trying to tell us that viewing the future may fix certain events into place, but only for the viewer. Joaquin can only see the future through the narrow lens of the cameras he has watching the news channels, not the wider picture around those events. It’s like being able to look into the future to see a boxer win a fight, but not being able to tell whether they’ll win the title.’
Lopez raised an eyebrow.
‘Yeah, until he gets that camera back. Then he’ll be able to see everything that the camera has. If it goes back to this supposed IRIS facility you mentioned, then any attack we try to launch on it, he’ll see coming.’
‘Yes,’ Ethan agreed, ‘but we had to let the camera go in order to prove who’s behind all of this. Considering the lengths that they’ve gone to, they obviously want that camera very badly indeed.’
‘Then
we need to move fast,’ Jarvis said. ‘Turns out that Joaquin Abell had both the motive and the know-how to both build his machine and kill Charles Purcell. Their fathers knew each other and they weren’t best buddies. Not only that, but Isaac Abell built some kind of underground base meant for housing a nuclear-fusion plant, but it never got finished.’ He looked at Ethan. ‘So how do we find the assassin now?’
‘Project Watchman,’ Ethan said. ‘By the time we get back to Canaveral, they could focus in down here on the Everglades and track the assassin’s movements. If as we suspect he’s working for IRIS, then Joaquin will no doubt have instructed his man to return immediately. We just follow him all the way home.’
Jarvis frowned.
‘He may anticipate our attempts to track him,’ the old man said. ‘Even though they won’t know about Watchman, they’ll try to hide their movements, and our satellites have their limitations.’
Lopez smiled as she realized what Ethan had done. ‘It won’t matter, as we’ll have another way of confirming IRIS’s involvement.’
Ethan nodded.
‘Charles Purcell made a prediction, probably based upon what he managed to view of the camera’s memory. He said that there would be an earthquake at sixteen-seventeen hours and twelve seconds this afternoon, northwest of the Dominican Republic. He said to search for electromagnetic anomalies in the Bermuda Triangle and that we’d find IRIS there, at the epicenter.’
Jarvis blinked.
‘The Bermuda Triangle? You think that the IRIS facility is underwater?’
‘Charles Purcell told us that’s where we’d find IRIS,’ Lopez explained, ‘and if this device of Joaquin’s was being tested on a regular basis then the magnetic fields generated could be responsible for the disappearance of ships and airplanes in the Bermuda Triangle over the years.’
‘If he’s really got a black hole down there,’ Ethan said, ‘then going after him directly could be very dangerous. Joaquin’s got a nuclear option if he wants it, and judging by how many people he’s killed in such a short space of time I’d say he’ll use it if his hand is forced.’
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