Jumper 1 - Jumper (32 page)

"I can't help you," he said. "The NSA is already on the lookout for the boat, but they have no idea of its destination. For all we know, it's a red herring. We don't know for sure that Matar is on the boat. He could have gone to ground in preparation for his next hijacking." He pulled his hand out of his pocket suddenly, a small automatic gripped tightly in his fist. "Don't move an inch," he said.

I didn't like the dark round spot at the end of the barrel, the one pointed at me. It made me shiver. "You've got to be kidding."

"I just got home. I spent most of the night on a polygraph machine and the rest of the time under drug-induced hypnosis. You don't think I'll shoot?"

I jumped to the hallway behind him and said, "Shoot at what?"

He jerked around, struggling to swing the pistol around. I jumped back to the chair. He looked around wildly, saw me sitting back in the recliner, my knees crossed, my fingers steepled together.

"Do you really think Matar will hijack another plane?"

His breathing came in short, sharp gasps and he held the gun with knuckle-whitening tightness. If he shot me, I wondered where I would jump to, to try and survive the wound. It occurred to me that if I was going to have dealings with the NSA I'd better acquire a jump site at a major trauma center emergency room.

"Yes, Matar didn't accomplish what he set out to do with the last hijacking," Perston-Smythe said. He pointed the pistol at the floor between us. His breathing was slowing. "How do you do that?"

"Bertol rays," I said. "Energy of a type humans have never seen before." I wondered if he'd recognize the overused "Star Trek" line. I might as well have said, "Beam me up, Scotty."

They came in the door then, not bothering with the doorbell, not even bothering with doorknob. I winced as the jamb splintered.

"Hope they buy you a new door," I said, as the first man entered the room, a small submachine gun in his arms. Before he could shoulder Perston-Smythe aside, I jumped.

The Stanville Library was closed for Christmas but that was probably for the best. I wondered how long it would be before I ended up with my picture in post offices. "Wanted, for National Security Violations." Maybe they wouldn't stoop that far. After all, public charges can be publicly defended.

I used the index of the
New York Times
on microfilm to look up the airports where aircraft hijackings had originated and ended. I'd already been to two of the airports, Madrid and Algiers. There were several more, including two in Cyprus, where hijacking deaths had occurred. I wanted to go to Cyprus anyway, to see where Mom had died.

It was slow work going through the index, finding the right spools, getting to the story, writing down the airport, and moving to the next film. By the time I was finished, it was five past midnight. I pocketed the list, put the spools carefully away, and jumped to the room in Wichita, Kansas, where Millie waited.

She was there in a long flannel nightgown, lying awake in the bed, a small light on, the curtains drawn. My worries of the afternoon faded away and I sat on the edge of her bed and kissed her. She wrapped her arms around me and I picked her up and jumped to the cliff dwelling, by the bed. I set her down.

"Cold," she said. She scrambled under the covers.

"I'll start a fire. Tell me what happened today."

She began talking as I gathered kindling and wood.

"They followed us to Sue's, my sister's, so I called the police and told them about the dark sedan with the four men that had followed my mother and myself across town and was parked outside on the street. They hit each end of the block with a car and boxed them in. Mother and I watched from the front yard.

"Anyway, they just waved some identification in front of the deputies' noses and they went away. I called the sheriff's office again, afterwards, and they would hardly talk to me. Finally they said that the men were federal agents and they weren't doing anything illegal. From his tone of voice, I think he thought I was some kind of criminal!"

The wood seemed to have caught well, so I went back to the bed and undressed. "That must have been distressful."

"Pissed me off is what it did. My brother-in-law Mark does casework for the ACLU. He's going to file an injunction against them as soon as the courthouse opens tomorrow morning."

"Good. Serves them right. And to think I was worried about you," I said, sliding under the cool sheets to press against her warm body. I told her about my visit to Perston-Smythe and my research at the library.

"So you're going to interfere with his next hijacking?"

"If I can," I said.

"I don't like it. I'm afraid you'll get killed."

The same thought had occurred to me. "I'm going to acquire a hospital jump site, first. With my ability to jump, I should be able to survive pretty serious damage, as long as I can jump to a trauma center as soon as I'm hurt."

"I don't know. Why run the risk at all?"

I thought about Mom again, those shocking milliseconds of video on the airport tarmac. "I want him, Millie. I want him to pay. I can't not run the risk."

At five in the morning I jumped Millie back to Wichita, to sleep the rest of the morning and awake under the continued scrutiny of government agents. I jumped to London and bought a ticket to Cyprus via Rome, both hijack sites. I slept on the flight.

At Rome I used the binoculars to pick a jump site through the window of the aircraft. Then I went to the lavatory, jumped off the plane and recorded the site with video, and jumped back aboard. In Cyprus, at the Nicosia airport, I repeated the process, except that I didn't jump back aboard the aircraft. I also didn't go through passport control or customs.

I walked into the airport terminal through doors that were locked from the other side. After all, the problem is usually to keep people from going the other way. Once inside I asked at the information desk about how to get to Larnaca Airport, at the south end of Cyprus.

There was a bus, but there was also an overpriced shuttle flight leaving in the morning. I bought a ticket for the shuttle, gritting my teeth at the thought of another commuter flight, then jumped back to New York City for lunch and some more research.

My problem was this: How was I going to know when there was a hijacking? I couldn't depend on them all to be like the Kuwaiti Airliner hijacking that lasted twenty days. I had to know within hours so that I could get to the appropriate airport.

In the end I contacted a news-monitoring service called Manhattan Media Monitoring.

"Hijackings? Hmm. We already monitor that for some of the airlines and also a couple of insurance companies. Do you want copies of the print media or video of the broadcast coverage, or both?"

"Video would be nice, but primarily I just want to be notified as soon as the news breaks."

"Phone or fax?"

I realized I no longer had a phone. "I'm on the road constantly. Better if I call you once or twice a day."

We arranged payment then, several months in advance in traveler's checks. This earned me some strange looks, but they didn't say anything. I didn't give them my real name.

Cyprus is seven hours later than Wichita, Kansas. Consequently I only had two hours alone with Millie before I jumped to the Nicosia airport for my 9:00 A.M. shuttle.

I picked her up at midnight and jumped her to the cliff dwelling.

"I spent the day fighting government fascism, honey. How was your day?"

"Huh," I said, undressing. This time I'd started a fire an hour before picking her up, so the temperature was comfortable. I also bought a split of champagne complete with plastic bucket. Remembering my adventure with champagne bottles at Sue Kimmel's party, I asked Millie to open it.

"We found a microphone in the kitchen today. I called the police again and Mark filed an injunction. Some federal attorneys showed up and they're slugging it out. Mark also sent a press release to every paper and news service around." The champagne cork went
pop.
"The police were a little more sympathetic after we found the microphone. Apparently there wasn't any court order obtained. Mom was outraged."

I slid under the covers and accepted a glass of champagne. "I'd apologize except you sound like you're
enjoying
yourself." The wine still tasted like bad ginger ale.

"My that's good," said Millie, drinking half the glass. She snuggled down next to me. "I'm sort of enjoying the fight. I just wish I could get to them, though. When we go out, there they are, their sunglasses on. They don't look mad, they don't look tired, they don't even look, well, human."

I shivered. "Well, they don't think I am, either."

"What do you mean?"

I told her about my parting remark, the "We mean no harm to your planet."

She giggled. "Oh, no! Why'd you do that?"

I shook my head. "I guess I thought that they'd look elsewhere for me, you know, like in orbit or something. I was hoping they wouldn't look for a human me."

"Well, I'm not so sure you should have said that. Now the military will get in on it, I bet."

"Oh, God. What a pain." I sipped some more bubbly, then set the glass down. "I've got to jump you home in two hours so I can catch a flight in Cyprus."

She drained her glass. "Well, that's not good. We better not waste any time, huh?"

I reached for her.

The commuter flight took only twenty-five minutes. I slept through most of it. I didn't have to go through customs. I did ask, though, where the American woman had died two months before. A Turkish Cypriot with passable English pointed the spot out from a terminal window.

"Was very bad. See the gray area? That was black from the explosion. They scrub and scrub but it doesn't come clean. Very bad."

I thanked him, even offered to tip him, but he wouldn't take it. He just shook his head and went away. I hope I didn't offend him, but I didn't think about it at the time. I just stared out at the gray spot on the tarmac, numb.

In reality, the gray spot was mostly the color of the surrounding tarmac. It was only slightly discolored, but the loop of news video kept playing in my head, superimposed—a gout of flame and smoke and the twisted, broken doll body.

Oh, Mom....

Will revenge bring her back, Davy? A million dead in Iran and Iraq. Fifty thousand dead in Lebanon. One woman dead in Cyprus. Will you revenge them all? What about the dead in Cambodia, Latin America, in South Africa?

They aren't my dead. They aren't my mother.

I felt sick. Too many dead, too many suffering.
Why do people do this to each other? What are you going to do with Matar when you get him?

I blinked tears away.

I'll answer that when I have him.

In El Solitario, above the water-filled pit with the little green island, I appeared on a ledge some fifty feet above the water. The walls stretched another fifty feet above me, but this ledge was over deep water. Besides, dropping from a hundred feet, you would reach fifty-five miles per hour before hitting the water. Though high divers did it, you could still break your neck if you hit at the wrong angle.

The sun wasn't high yet, and only the upper reaches of the opposite wall were lit by direct sunlight. Still, the rock was light limestone and it reflected the light well. The water below was an unblemished mirror, showing the blue sky and white walls and me.

I stepped off the ledge and dropped. It would take 1.767 seconds to reach the water, but at a little over one second, the wind starting to whistle in my ears, I jumped away, to the top of the pit, looking down at the unblemished water.

I took a deep breath. The water looked very cold and hard, like polished iron.

Again, only this time, I didn't appear on the ledge—I appeared two feet out from the ledge, in midair. Again, I dropped, jumping away before hitting the water.

I did this again and again and again.

Athens, Beirut, Cairo, Tehran, Baghdad, Amman, Bahrain, Kuwait City, Istanbul, Tunis, Casablanca, Rabat, Ankara, Karachi, Lahore, Riyadh, Mecca, Knossos, Rhodes, Smyrna, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Damascus, Baghdad, Naples, Venice, Seville, Paris, Marseilles, Barcelona, Belfast, Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, Bonn, Amsterdam.

I couldn't get a visa for Tripoli, in Libya, but I went anyway, not even buying a ticket, just jumping past the gate agent and the flight attendant. It was not a popular flight—the plane was half empty. I repeated the process at the other end.

I tried to do at least one airport a day, sometimes two. I would get up at two or three in the morning, jump to the departing city, sleep fitfully on the plane, acquire the new jump site, and be back by ten in the morning. Then I'd call Manhattan Media Monitoring and see if there were any hijackings.

There was only one during the month of January, an Aeroflot flight diverted to Kabul, Afghanistan, by several Soviet convicts. They'd given themselves up shortly after arrival. I didn't know what I would have done if they hadn't. I didn't have a jump site in Afghanistan at that time.

After a week of legal huffing and puffing, Millie agreed to a federal judge-supervised interview by the NSA with her lawyer present. She told me about it after I'd jumped her to the cliff dwelling late one night.

"They brought your friend in from Washington."

"Who, Perston-Smythe?"

She shook her head. "No, no. Cox, Brian Cox, the guy from the NSA with the sidewalls."

"Sidewalls?"

She touched the side of her head. "Shaved on the sides. Fleshy neck. Big shoulders?"

"I knew who you meant. I just didn't know what you meant by sidewalls."

"Ah. Well, he starts by asking where you are."

"What did he say exactly?"

" 'Where is David Rice?' I answered with the literal truth. I said I didn't know, adding that we'd broken up in November. Both of these things were true—you were off flying around Europe and we
did
break up in November."

I nodded. "Go on."

"Well, I had to lie, then. He asked if I'd seen you since we broke up. I said no. I was afraid I wouldn't sound very convincing, but I think I sounded great. I'm afraid you're a very bad influence.