Looking up, he saw the climb's familiar progression. Each step, each lunge, each hand placement. He'd done it many times before. Laing relaxed into the sharp edged routine. The jagged granite spikes of California's Joshua Tree National Park rose above him. His refuge.
Then the scene wavered, a furnace shimmer blasting the air. A single ripple and it reset. Only now, Ryan knew he was dreaming. And he knew what came next.
He craned his neck to see the shot. This time, he could stop it. This time, he would not fall. On a ridge across the valley, he saw the gun's barrel. Exposed, out of control, he scrambled with mad abandon—trying to evade the inevitable.
When the shot came, it was almost a relief. Expectation shattered in the crumble of rock and a long fall to the valley floor. Impact.
The pain, the confusion, the soft anger of finality. Ryan remembered it all and experienced it again. He closed his eyes to the sun's glare. In darkness, he savored these last moments.
He opened his eyes. A figure stood over him. A sun-tipped silhouette, cool dark on seared heat. It stooped, lifting him from the red caked dirt with no effort. The pain in Ryan ceased.
He looked up at the figure. Before him, the man rippled, then settled. Brown hair, touched with gray. Deep brown eyes over lined cheeks. A smile that made life feel manageable. Christopher Turing.
Laing knew this wasn't real. In reality, Turing had revived Ryan from the fall by injecting him with the drones. In reality, Ryan had been forced to kill Turing as Echelon crumbled.
Ryan shook himself. He craned back, looking to the place where the assassin had been.
“Did you kill me?” He stumbled over the words, unable to pull from the waking dream.
“No, Ryan.” Turing's lips moved out of synch with the voice, as if the transmission hadn't quite locked true.
“Then what . . .”
Turing's hand gripped Ryan's shoulder. With the touch, a pulse of relief swept though Laing. “I missed you.” The words felt trite and small, like a goldfish trying to describe the ocean.
As he stared at Turing, the past years crisped and flaked away. For a moment, Ryan glimpsed the man he used to be. The man who knew that life was controlled. That no matter what, Christopher Turing, and Echelon, would be there for him.
Turing smiled as if nothing had happened—as if Ryan had not killed him to end Echelon's tyranny. He smiled with the love of a father looking down at his son.
A heat ripple. The cliffs over Ryan shivered. His vision fuzzed to an image of Turing, lying dead.
“No,” Ryan whispered. Joshua Tree and Turing's smiling face snapped back.
Then, the long fall through the flow as Echelon died. And after . . . Flickering images of Sarah leaving him. Of chaos ripping the world apart.
The images overpowered Joshua Tree's granite spires and Turing's gentle gaze.
“No, no!” Ryan screamed. Turing's grip on his shoulder evanesced with the decaying scene.
Ryan reached out for Turing. His hand slipped through the apparition. Turing's image blasted out. Joshua Tree vanished.
Now there was only darkness, the ink black that ran through Ryan's life since he'd lost Turing. Through the few good times, and the more plentiful bad ones since Turing's death, Ryan's experience of life had faded to monochrome. Without the man who had been more to Ryan than his own father, life was less. The darkness of loss hung over everything.
Ryan reached into the void, needing to pull the dream back to him.
“No!” he screamed into the black.
Cold permeated him. Then the images returned. Turing's death kicked into the following years and kaleidoscoped over the last days. Finally, the present expanded around Ryan, covering the darkness but not vanquishing it.
“No!” His scream expanded, lost to infinity.
BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON CORRIDOR
Hands on Ryan's shoulders. Shaking him.
“No! No! No!” Ryan's screams reverberated off the walls of a small room, his own voice lurching him back to reality.
Frank Savakis stood over him. “Fuck, Laing. Shut up. You'll wake the neighbors.”
Laing whipped an arm out, shoving Frank's hands from him. “What . . .”
Frank stepped back, rubbing his wrist. “You got issues enough to finance a team of psychs.”
Laing sat up, regaining composure. Amid the brown clutter of Frank's apartment, he flashed back to the peace he'd had just a moment ago. He scratched the vision of Turing from his eyes, rubbing them to bloodshot.
“Sorry,” Laing said, voice hoarse. “Bad dream.”
“If I dreamed that bad, I'd give up sleep on principle.” Frank kicked aside the detritus of dirty clothes littering his floor to get to the kitchen. “You want food? Coffee?”
Laing rose, the effort drawing a wheeze that crescendoed into a coughing fit.
“Still sick, huh?”
“Yeah,” Laing grunted.
The dark funk of Frank's stack apartment pushed in on Ryan. He needed air. Quick. He lurched across the narrow room to dust-brown drapes and ripped them open. A corrugated wall greeted him.
“Fuckin' stacks,” he sputtered.
Frank just laughed. “Not on for exterior view till seven.” Frank shoved a cup of coffee into Laing's hand. “Work on this,” he said.
Laing took the coffee, pacing the room in slow circles as he drank. Each time he passed the window, looking dead into the side of another stack apartment, he grimaced.
Finally, Frank had enough. “The fuck?! You live in a fucking tent—in Antarctica!”
“Why live in the stacks? The CIA has to pay better than this.”
Frank gazed at the surroundings as if surprised by Laing's criticism. “Comfortable here,” he said. “Feels homey.”
Slammed up against the Port of Baltimore's Seagirt Marine Terminal, the stacks were an urban development concept gone, to Ryan's mind, horribly wrong. A framework of steel rose five hundred meters into the sky. Within it, mobile housing units—stacks—nestled like eggs in a carton. Tens of thousands—one slotted against the other—each moving to the exterior and then turning back, allowing each a glimpse of the Baltimore-Washington Corridor for a few hours per day.
Laing shivered, thinking about how many housing pods stood between him and daylight. “This feels homey?”
“That's right. I grew up here. Actually in a box format. This here,” Frank said, waving his arm with regal nonchalance, “is about twice the size.”
“Double wide, huh,” Ryan said, to which Frank laughed.
Laing continued his lap. On a shelf, lightly dusted, stood a framed vid shot. It showed a man standing on a dock, a massive hauler looming behind him.
“This your dad?”
Frank grunted in the affirmative. “He was a longshoreman. Automation would of ended his career eventually. A malfunctioning load winch sped up the process.”
Laing turned to Frank, who stared back with hard eyes. The man wasn't the type to break down on bringing up a dead parent.
“Sorry,” Ryan said.
Frank just went back to his breakfast, a freeze packed ham and egg plate. He snapped the edge of the package, the chemical sizzle warming his food.
“Long way from here to Langley,” Laing continued.
“Something those Ivy League fucks never let me forget. That's all right, though. They got pedigree. I got talent.” He spit out the last word like a pit. “I stay here to hold on to my roots. Too easy to get lost in all the shit, you know.”
“My parents were ranchers.” Laing couldn't bring himself to say the rest. That his parents had also been pushed into uselessness by the hand of global commerce. That their sad lives had also been cut short.
“I know,” Frank said, not looking up from his steaming meal.
Laing nodded and continued his pacing as he worked on the coffee. “Even your coffee smells like foot.”
“Well, aren't you the fuckin' critic,” Frank replied, shoveling a load of egg into his mouth. “Ma always sa
id that fish and guests begin to stink after three days.”
Laing pulled away from his coffee, swiveling to Frank in shock. “I been out that long?”
“Near to it.”
Laing vaguely remembered getting here. After detox, they'd emerged into a gray silence. Flash burns arced up the wall of Trenton's port, the barrio's shadow embossed into the carbon steel. At the base, only a swell of ash. Nothing else remained. Frank had taken him home. Then a marathon of fever and dream.
Didn't make sense that the drones couldn't kill off this pathogen. He felt their roving swarm through his body, a swirling battle on the cellular level. Were it not for the drones, his body would have killed itself by now. They were the only thing keeping his cells from self-destructing.
For now, the battle seemed to have reached an equilibrium. He felt like shit, but he could operate. A thought occurred to him. He jumped to the counter. Frank sat over his food, sawing on the ham steak with supreme concentration. Laing grabbed the knife from him.
“Hey!” Frank sputtered.
Laing ignored him. He opened his palm and pressed the knife down, sliding it over the length of his hand. He pulled the knife away and stared in shock. He closed his hand into a fist.
Frank grabbed his wrist. Laing couldn't bring himself to move.
“The fuck you doing?!” Frank demanded.
Finally, Laing opened his hand. His palm was covered in blood.
Blood spilled from the wound and flowed over Ryan's palm. Drones clustered in the blood like patches of oil, but not enough to suture the wound.
Laing showed it to Frank. He walked to the sink, ran his palm under the water and wrapped it in a towel, which quickly streaked red.
“How's that possible?” Frank asked.
“Whatever's in me is so severe that the drones can't do more than keep me alive.”
“What would do that?”
“Only something targeted at me specifically.”
Ryan watched that settle over Frank.
“But it's not spreading. We're sharing the same air, and I'm fine.”
“Like I said—I'm fighting this thing. Hard to describe what the drones are doing, but I can shift the virus just enough to disrupt transmission. Takes everything I've got, though.”
“So the virus serves a double purpose,” Frank said. “It puts the mother of all bull's-eyes on Sarah Peters's head. Anywhere she goes, at any time, the virus can kick up and she's suddenly surrounded by corpses.”
“Add to that, she becomes the perfect scapegoat for bioattacks around the world—like Australia.”
“Some coldhearted shit. And then, this pathogen in Sarah hits you, hurts you—but doesn't quite knock you off.”
“You complaining?” Ryan asked.
“Just saying . . .” Frank paused, digging a clean knife from the drawer and reengaging the ham. “Someone wants you vulnerable—and they knew you'd hunt Sarah to the ends of the earth.”
“We're—” Laing stopped himself. That wasn't right. “I'm being played.”
“We're playing catch-up here.”
“And we're no closer to the truth.”
Frank grinned, bits of egg pocking his smile. “Not quite right. Check this out.”
Frank flicked at the remote and the plexi window went opaque. Then it rezzed into a screen. A still image of the Trenton disaster came up.
“While you were getting your beauty sleep, I've been working.”
“You find Sarah?”
“No. She either slipped away or got incinerated.”
“She's not dead.” Ryan tried for conviction, but it came out as a weak plea. “
Yeah . . . okay.” Frank stumbled over his words, uncomfortable with Ryan's display.
Ryan reined in his emotions, locking back into cold analysis. “Any more virus blooms?”
“No! Will you get your mind out of that babe's pants and listen to me?”
Laing turned, anger flushing out his pallor. Frank plowed on before he could get another word in. “I'm not so interested in Peters. She's known. I'm interested in the other guy. Tall, thin, brown hair—beat the shit out of you—ring any bells?”
Frank flicked at the screen; the image wavered, then slid backward. The barrio rebuilt itself. In reverse time, Laing watched Sarah seemingly launch up into his hands, then saw his climb up the stanchion. Time slowed, then froze.
“Am I missing something?” Laing asked.
“Guy was pretty good at staying off vid. None of the fed links caught him.” “
So—”
“So the fucker didn't count on my wire. Probably didn't count on my buckshot pounding into his shoulder either.”
Frank flipped the feed.
On screen, a fast-motion blur tracked Frank's working up the barrio and toward the commotion. Then the fight, fast and brutal. Finally, an arm rose, and the shotgun discharged.
Frank slowed to frame-by-frame.
The screen went white from the single shot. Just as the flash faded and the buckshot found target, Frank froze the playback.
“Son of a bitch,” Laing said.
On screen was a frame of the assailant, shoulder blown back with the impact of Frank's shot. Surprise wiped through the clean features of his perfectly rezzed face.
“Yup.”
Laing turned away from the man and looked to Frank.
“Well, you get an ID?”
“Wasn't easy. This fucker gets more knife work than a porn queen. Cheeks shaved, nose sharpened, then later plumped. Eye color shifts—the works.”
Laing gave Frank a look, pushing him to get on with it.
“All right, all right,” Frank said. “I see you're not gonna praise my stellar fucking work. Short answer, yes. I mapped the guy's mug, morphed the features to account for surgical variants, then did a long scan on our archives. Took all night. But we got him in Lhasa on the day the Dalai Lama got snuffed.”
“But that was an EMPYRE job.”
“Also tagged him in Dubai and then in New York just hours before Dillon's place blew.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. He makes the rounds pretty good—for a dead guy.”
“Come again?” Laing asked.
Frank flipped to another screen load. It showed a man of similar proportions, this time dressed in fatigues.
“He was one of ours. Name's Zachary—“
“Taylor,” Ryan cut in.
“Yeah,” Frank responded. “How do you know that?”
“He...he told me,” Ryan said. “I just remembered.”
“Well, that would have been a nice piece of information to pass on,” Frank huffed.
“Sorry. Slipped my mind while I was trying so hard not to get dead.”
“Yeah, well, I guess that's fair.” Frank pulled up a shot of a hovercraft, flipped and burning. A bloody corpse floated next to the hulk.
“That's Taylor—dead. Doesn't look like him now, after all the knife work. But I've analyzed these images six ways to Sunday—bone structure, body proportion—and that's him.”
Something about the shot pricked Laing's curiosity. He approached the screen and looked at it for some time.
“That hovercraft looks ...It's not a military vehicle.”
“Nope. That's a United Nations transport. It pulled Taylor from the Crimea. He was on his way to The Hague for trial.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Taylor had been on active duty for three years straight. Deep in it. He finally went bat shit—blew up a school bus that he claimed held arms.”
“Did it?”
“Oh, yeah—big-time. It also held thirty-seven kids.” Frank flipped back to the head shot and stared into Taylor's dark eyes. “Fucker was going to fry.”
“So, what happened?”
“The Crimean Tartars weren't exactly thrilled with seeing him shipped off to a cushy UN facility. Had their hearts set on some eye-for-an-eye style justice. So they hit the craft. Stink over that forced the UN to leave the combat zone.
Neither side held back after that. The region was decimated in a matter of weeks. In the end, worked out pretty well for the good guys.”
“And who's that?”
“That's us. That's the USA.” The look in Frank's eyes told Laing not to prod further on that subject. The man was a believer. “With the UN out of the picture, the Crimean push for independence faltered and we were able to install a more cooperative government in Ukraine.”
“And now—years later—here he is. Living. Breathing. And always in the wrong place at the right time.”
“He's the key. The link between Sarah, you, EMPYRE, and . . .” Frank paused.
“And?” Laing raised his eyes. Frank kept his lowered. “Come on, man. Too late for secrets.”
“And Phoenix.” Seeing Laing's confusion, Frank continued. “EMPYRE farmed out their dirty work. They made the call and Phoenix went into action.”
“Jesus. If just once the people doing the scheming then did the killing . . .” Ryan let the words tail into silence.
“Hey, I don't love it either. Nearly pissed my career away tracking Phoenix. That said, can't very well have American fingerprints all over the kinda jobs EMPYRE was pulling. EMPYRE had to stay clean. Phoenix solved their problems.”
“You're saying Taylor is Phoenix?”
“Maybe. Or part of it.”
“So EMPYRE's pit bull goes off leash and kills its master.”
“I'd think you'd appreciate the move.”
“How's that?”
“You were the pit bull that ended Echelon. Looks like these conspiracies gotta be more careful crafting their killers.”
Ryan didn't take the bait. “So why does Phoenix want me?”
“The fuck do I know? Don't really care. I'm more interested in inflicting a little Old Testament retribution.”
The hard edge in Savakis's tone pulled Ryan from his own musings. The blood-deep drive for revenge was evident. “That's all you care about, isn't it?” Ryan asked.
“They were my team. My people.”
“EMPYRE would have killed you in an instant if it served their purpose.”
“Oh, give it a fuckin' rest. You think you're the only guy who sees big picture? I mean, shit, we all get used and abused. That's the job. If you didn't like it, you would never have gotten as far as you did. So—you can trust me or not, like me or not, but here's the deal—you're a big fat, fuckin' target. You've got someone after you that knows you better than you know yourself. You want that person. I want that person. Doesn't fuckin' matter why—our goals run the same path. And you're not Superman anymore.”
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