Energized (39 page)

Even if the Russians had failed to decrypt the latest radio links to PS-1, they knew—the world knew—the U.S. had launched a missile salvo. Anyone with a decent pair of binocs could see that PS-1 remained intact. Any country with a decent early-warning system knew the missile payloads had been allowed to soar past PS-1.

So: hurried American announcements aside, the Russians knew who, however tenuously, controlled the powersat. They could not be happy about the reversal. The next few hours, until the U.S. could scramble a shuttle, were crucial. Until then, what was to stop the Russians from launching their own shuttle to, heroically, secure—and take occupation of?—the powersat?

The heat-targeting capability their agents had demonstrated against a Cosmic Adventures shuttle just two days earlier.

“Okay,” Charmaine said. “If I don't hear from you within the hour, I'll come looking. Good luck.”

“Thanks.” Tyler hung up, hoping matters did not come down to luck.

*   *   *

Yakov grimaced in concentration, trying to digest the latest setback—and the ambassador's fury. Yakov drummed his fingers on his desk. He rocked in his chair. Vodka was not helping his mood any more than the Shostakovich symphony that pounded from the stereo. How had his operatives lost control of—

The doorbell rang.

Through an exterior security camera, Yakov saw a pizza van parked at his curb. A guy in a baseball cap and garish red company vest stood at the front door holding an insulated pizza carrier.

Yakov had not ordered anything; the man had to have the wrong house. As Yakov pressed the intercom button, the pizza guy tugged on the pizza carrier, lifting its flap to reveal a note:
Look at me
. The driver removed his cap, ostensibly to scratch the top of his head.

The “pizza guy” was Tyler Pope.

“Be right there,” Yakov said. He hurried to the door. “Come in while I get my wallet.”

The moment the door closed, Pope removed the hat and vest. He said, “You don't have much time, Yakov.”

“I don't understand—”

“Playing charades has been fun, but not today. You are FSB. I'm CIA. Okay?”

“Okay,” Yakov conceded.

“I don't know what the Restored Caliphate has against you, but I do know that the Caliph's Guard has a team in country set for a snatch. In town, actually. Yesterday and today the chatter ramped
way
up. My bosses are very unhappy with you, with very good cause, and I've been told to look the other way.

“But scumbag that you are, I can't get past that you have diplomatic immunity. So get the hell out of Dodge. The tower at Reagan National is primed to clear a diplomatic flight. You keep your plane prepped, right?”

“But Valentina—”

“Has three Agency people keeping an eye on her. Your wife will be fine.” Pope set down the pizza carrier. “Have you noticed any new surveillance recently? You
must
have, because these guys are more enthusiastic than skilled.”

The gray sedan. The white van. And if the Caliph's Guard had come for him …

“What do you propose?” Yakov asked.

Tyler offered the cap and vest. “Put these on. Take the pizza van. Get to the airport.”

Yakov's antennae tingled. “And leave you—”

“Yeah, yeah, you keep secret papers or whatever here.” Pope took plastic wrist ties out of his pocket. “The clock's ticking, damn it. Bind me to a chair or whatever. Valentina, when she finds me, can call the cops or your embassy.”

“Right.” He bound Pope's wrists behind him, arms around one of the sturdy floor-to-ceiling decorative columns that separated the foyer from the dining room. “I owe you one, Tyler.”

“Then owe me two. Consider it my final neighborly favor. Is your Psycho friend local?” Pope laughed. “I know you won't tell me. But the chatter involved Psycho Cyborg, too. Who, I imagine, has no immunity. Because what the Caliph's Guard will do…”

Yakov shuddered. “Point taken.” He slipped on the vest and cap.

“Don't forget the pizza carrier. Keys for the van are in the vest.”

“I won't forget this,” Yakov said.

“Good to know,” Pope answered.

Yakov sauntered to the van, warning himself not to look too casual. Turning out of the subdivision, he spotted the gray sedan by the side of the road. Two people still sat inside.

He phoned ahead to the airport. And using the must-flee code phrase, he texted Irinushka to meet him at the general aviation terminal.

Psycho Cyborg deserved the same warning Pope had given him.

*   *   *

Dillon's universe had shrunk to a small closet. It would have been crowded for one. With ghosts, too …

If only the end would
get
here already. Instead the awful screaming echoed and reechoed in his brain.

And the dreadful
hissing
when Jonas's helmet had—well, Dillon was not sure quite what. He wasn't sure of anything, except the awful screams, then death rattles, and then eeriest of all, the silence.

He had screamed, too. He had pounded on the shelter door. No one could hear it, but he couldn't
not
pound.

What had happened? What
could
have happened?

After he had screamed, and moaned, and bemoaned his fate, a fragile clarity returned. Maybe the stranger who had shown up with Jonas was not who Jonas expected. Maybe the stranger had turned on Jonas. And if one stranger had arrived on the powersat, why not more? Was that not, in fact, likely?

Dillon switched from the mission frequency to the common, unencrypted channel. And people were chattering! A man and a woman. Another woman, her responses so delayed that she must be on Earth.

To have been trapped in this shelter proclaimed, if not Dillon's complete innocence, at least his reticence. Especially if Jonas and the rest were no longer alive to contradict him.

“Hello? Anyone?” Dillon called. “Anyone here on PS-1?”

“Who
is
this?” the man asked. “Where are you?”

“My name's Dillon. The … terrorists made me come with them. They shut me in a radiation shelter.”

“Hold on a second.”

The newcomers must have switched to a private channel for a while. A long while. Dillon wondered if they meant to leave him in his closet. If they did, he could not blame them.

“I know who you are, Dillon. And I saw you holding a gun on Phoebe.”

“I was blackmailed to bring those men to The Space Place. At that point, I think they decided I knew too much about them. That's why they gave me the gun. I couldn't stay on Phoebe once everyone there believed I was one of the terrorists.”

Skeptically, “Hold on.”

“Wait! I'm low on oh-two.”

Another pause. “Okay. I see a shelter with its latch jammed. I'm guessing that's you. Hit the door.”

Dillon pounded, the door flexing beneath his fist. “Here! See me?”

“Yeah. Did you hear what happened to your cronies?”

He shuddered. “Yes.”

“Remember that. When I give you the word, come out
very
carefully.” The inside latch wiggled. “Very slowly.”

Dillon opened the door just enough to show his hands, empty, then grabbed an exterior handhold to swing himself out. Two people in green counterpressure suits—
MORGAN
and
JUDSON
, their suit labels read—watched as Dillon tethered himself to the nearest guide cable. Judson inspected Dillon head to toe, front and back and took his tool kit before Morgan offered an oh-two tank.

Hundreds of bots all but surrounded them. If Dillon's eyes did not deceive him, some of the bots were flecked with red.

He shuddered. “Thank you.”

“Don't thank anyone yet,” a new voice answered. “I'm Pope, by the way. You and I are going to have a chat. As soon as you're jacked in.”

Dillon's new captors gave him a long roll of fiber-optic cable. Long enough to hang himself, he thought. A deranged cackle escaped him.

“You find this situation funny?” Pope demanded.

“No!” Because Dillon had to wonder: Why question him here? Why not wait a few hours till he could be properly—interrogated—on Earth? Unless they had not yet decided whether to bring him. “No,” he repeated, detesting the quaver in his voice.

“Good. Now tell me about your cronies.”

And Dillon babbled. About how he met Yakov. About their arrangement, and the brilliant engineers Yakov had provided. About the OTEC platform.

That he could discuss the Santa Cruz incident, and that little girl, without as much as a catch in his throat made Dillon ill. The last few days had made him … callous? No, numb. How could he mourn one child and her grandfather with the blood of hundreds, maybe thousands, on his hands?

“And Yakov is getting away, scot-free,” Pope said. “Skipping the country. Flying away. Not that we could touch him anyway. Diplomatic immunity.”

Diplomatic immunity.
Pope made the words sound obscene. Like some horrible miscarriage of justice. Or maybe, Dillon thought, that's how
I
feel.

Through the view port at Dillon's feet, beautiful Earth was just past full phase. Only Earth was not everywhere beautiful: the inky smudge of the Venezuelan disaster tore at his heart. By daylight, the spill and smoke was the only damage he could see. Not like the night-visible rolling blackouts that had surged back and forth across Europe.…

And then it hit him: Pope had volunteered information. Why?

“Skipping the country,” Dillon said. “How?”

“On his private jet, speeding across the Atlantic. The only plane in the air for thousands of miles. Doubtless laughing his ass off at us.”

At that instant, Dillon understood what Pope wanted. What could not be put into words. The price of Dillon's ticket to the ground.

He braced his feet against a guide cable. Even as he yanked great lengths of tether free from his reel, he leapt. He soared over the bot hordes, and then the tether pulled him up short. He began arcing down.

Toward the nearest main computer complex.

*   *   *

Yakov had flown many times across the Atlantic. He had never before seen the radar screen empty. It was uncanny.

Irina Ivanovna sat in the copilot's seat, noise-canceling earphones shielding her cochlear implants from the drone of the engines. “Where will we go?”

“Moscow.” Where else? “As disappointed as I am that the Americans did not destroy PS-1, the operation remains a tactical success. American extremists used an illegal American weapons platform to terrorize most of the world. In the process, we made everyone more dependent than ever on Russian oil.”

“Will everyone see things as you do?”

“In Moscow we will make our case,” he assured her.

“So why are you nervous?”

He was
not
nervous, he told himself. But then why was he sweating? He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “Contemplation of the Caliph's Guard will do that to a person.”

Irina was sweating, too. “Does the Guard know? I mean
know,
not just suspect?”

They could not know. No one in the FSB could have been so stupid as to reveal what he had done. But secrets escaped for reasons beyond stupidity.

Yakov's mind spun off into wheels within wheels, and paranoid fantasies, about who might have been coerced, or corrupted, or a double agent, or …

“Why is it so
hot
?” she demanded. “Can you turn down the heat?”

“Of course.” He reached for the console—

The metal panel burnt like fire. As he stared, incredulous, at seared fingertips, the console erupted in sparks. His instruments went blank.

Irina screamed. Her face twisting with pain, she threw aside her earphones, also sparking, to slap at the smoke spewing from behind her ears.

“We won't be going to Moscow,” Yakov said. Because the universe had, if not a sense of poetic justice, then a dark sense of humor.

Not that Irinushka could hear him anymore.

The Learjet's left engine burst into flame, and then the right. The plane went into a sickening plunge. Black smoke filled the cockpit. He felt himself charring, blistering, roasting. He felt he must explode into a bloody cloud of steam.

Well played, Tyler.

The instant of immolation when the fireball erupted was a sweet release.

 

EPILOGUE | 2023

 

Wednesday, November 1

“This is about Dad, isn't it?” Clarissa asked, tugging and twisting a lock of hair.

“I don't know, hon. I just don't know.” Anna Burkhalter put an arm around her daughter and gave a hopefully reassuring squeeze. They sat side by side on their living room sofa.

“What exactly did they say?” Rob asked from his college dorm room.

As Rob
kept
asking, with only the slightest variations in wording, as though some secret truth waited to be teased and coaxed out of the cryptic request. Summons. Command.

Anna looked around the room with embarrassment. She had been on the verge of replacing the battered tables, the worn-shiny fabric of the sofa, the dated carpet, the cat-tattered curtains. She had been on the verge for years. More urgent uses for the money had always intruded, even before the divorce.

“Only that we make ourselves available for this call. Just the three of us. You
are
alone, aren't you, Rob?”

“
Yes,
Mom.”

“I think we have to prepare for the worst,” Anna said.

Because they had not heard from Patrick for a month. No one had. He would never go this long without calling or e-mailing the kids—if he could.

Because whatever else Anna had to say about Patrick, he was a good father. As good, in any event, as the kids let him be—and that they did not always allow him was probably her fault.