The Fall (24 page)

“I appreciate that, sir.”

“All right,” Hastings said. “I need to run now. Let me know if there's anything we can do at this end, Pete, and I'll be down in a week to go through our standard program reviews. There's also … something else we need to discuss. But it's better done in person.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, glad that Hastings had bought his cover story, but now intrigued by the general's last comment.

He hung up and decided to put that aside for now. At the moment he had more pressing issues, including thinking through a plan to not just inspect the suit in secrecy for now, but also to locate Angela and Jack.

Pete looked into the distance, toward the ocean.

*   *   *

The explosion was visible even from five miles away, followed a few seconds later by a sound wave resembling distant thunder.

“Oh, my God,” she mumbled in the darkness, standing next to him.

“It's done,” Jack said, turning off the remote detonator before flipping the bilge blowers of the thirty-nine-foot Tiara he had quietly towed out to sea from the ranks of moored motors and sail yachts dotting the large waterway of the Fort Pierce marina.

The rest had been easy, transferring their gear, including the scuba equipment, to the larger vessel, which he hoped wouldn't be reported stolen for a few hours. Jack had then placed a C4 charge next to the Boston Whaler's gas tank and pointed it out to sea, accelerating to twenty knots before engaging the autopilot and jumping off, swimming back a thousand feet to the Tiara, where Angela was busy securing their gear to the bungees lining the port and starboard railings of the yacht's open stern.

He bypassed the simple key ignition system and waited sixty seconds to clear out any fumes from the engine compartment below, which housed a pair of Crusader 350HP gas inboards, before engaging the portside engine, which came to life with a low rumbling sound. He watched the oil pressure climb into the green before punching the button for the starboard-side engine, which caught right away.

He inspected the gauges once more while letting them warm up, confirming his initial inspection of the yacht back at the marina. The vessel was old but well maintained, with a two-thirds full 398-gallon tank, plenty to get them to their destination while the Coast Guard—and whoever else Pete had searching for them—remained distracted by his diversion.

Turning on all navigation lights, he slowly advanced the port and starboard throttles in unison while engaging the stern trim tabs, bringing the yacht to an efficient plane angle as they reached a relaxed cruise speed of twenty knots about a mile from shore.

The Tiara sliced through the waves far easier than the smaller Whaler as Jack sat back on the wide bench behind the controls and Angela snuggled up next to him again, her chest pressed against his arm. Being much longer and heavier, the yacht also gave them a much gentler and quieter ride, especially behind the controls, protected by a tall and semicircular windshield that cut down the wind noise, allowing them to hold a conversation without having to shout.

“Looks like about three hours to Miami Beach,” she said, her head on his shoulder and her eyes on the GPS while he nodded in agreement before surveying the dark horizon, spotting a few vessels far out at sea, but nothing directly ahead as they followed the coastline toward the tip of the peninsula.

“Yep. And
that
should keep them busy for a while,” he said, extending a thumb over his left shoulder.

“Let's hope so,” she said, reaching in her jeans' front pocket. “We need time to figure out what the hell this is.”

Jack glared at her hand in disbelief as she held the purple glass token.

“Angie! You got it!”

“Of course,” she said. “I wasn't going to leave it behind for that son of a bitch.”

Jack grinned.

“This is the one module I don't understand in that suit,” she added.

“Thank you,” he said, perhaps with more gratitude than he wished to show.

“I know you need to get back to your world, Jack … and to your wife.”

“Angie, I—”

“Hush,” she added. “But I also want to make sure that you understand that while you're in
my
world, you belong to
me
. Clear?”

“Crystal,” he said.

“Good,” she replied, tightening her grip on his arm. “First thing we need to do is figure out what this is supposed to do.”

“It has to be connected to the light I saw,” he replied.

“The question is
how,
Jack,” she said, before biting her lower lip while staring into the darkness, thinking. The navigation lights cast an almost magical glow across her profile, narrowed hazel eyes glistening.

His emotional side overpowered all logic, making him wonder if he really wanted to go home.

Ever.

“What I don't get,” Angela added, completely oblivious of the thoughts splitting through his common sense. “How can a little piece of glass like this with an embedded integrated circuit wreak such havoc on the laws of physics?”

“I know,” he said, refocusing his thoughts. “But you said you knew someone who might be able to help?”

“I do,” she said. “His name is Jonathan Layton, a professor of theoretical physics at FIT.”

“How well do you know this guy?”

“Quite well, actually. He's in his late sixties and lost his wife to breast cancer two years ago. Very sweet old man, and very smart, too. Took me under his wing in the department when I first came in.”

“Does Pete know you know him?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because I'm sure he's going to be under surveillance, so we're going to have to figure out a way to approach him without alerting any tails.”

“How?” she asked.

“Not sure yet. Add that to the list of things we'll need to figure out,” he said. “Starting with how Pete's playing this out.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how is he explaining all of this to his superiors? I don't think he simply told them I've come back from the dead … or from another dimension. But somehow he was able to gather up quite a few soldiers in no time, plus enlist the Coast Guard and probably even a few Air Force drones to track us down.”

“Here's one way to find out,” Angela said, reaching for the radio on the console, next to the instrumentation, and once more began to scan the Coast Guard frequencies.

“Good thinking,” he said.

It didn't take longer than twenty minutes listening to conversations between Coast Guard personnel to start to paint a picture of their situation, which included her death at the hand of Al-Qaeda terrorists on American soil.

Angela sat back, fuming. “I can't fucking believe it.”

“Sorry,” he said.

“First he lied to me and tried to have us killed, then he blew up our house, and now the asshole's telling the whole world that I'm dead at the hands of terrorists.” Crossing her arms, she stared into the distance while biting her lower lip.

He put an arm around her. “He'll get what's coming to him. Though I have to admit, the man's pretty smart.”

She swung her head in his direction. “What?”

“Smart,” he repeated. “By claiming this was a terrorist attack and having you killed in the process, he can now legally and quite easily freeze all of your assets, from bank accounts and credit cards to all of your investments and pension plans. That's his way to force you to the surface. It's a lot harder hiding out without funds.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It's just how he's making his moves. Now we have to make ours.”

“So you think he believes we survived the blast?”

“Probably. I mean, he knows my skills, and frankly stealing a boat while planting a remotely detonated blast in another is a cakewalk for me. I'm betting he believes you're alive and on the run with me, but he's having the whole world think you're dead via suicide bombers.”

“That way he can get everybody to forget about me,” she said, completing his thought.

“Right, and notice I haven't been mentioned in any of the reports, and there's also no mention of whatever he was able to recover from that OSS after the house exploded.”

“Which could be quite a bit,” she said.

“Maybe. But I saw it being peppered with bullets, and that was before the grenades detonated inside the house.”

“Yeah, but I had packed it in the helmet, so even though it may have some bullet holes, the remaining ablation layer on the helmet would have gone a long way to protect it from the shockwaves and flames.”

Jack hadn't considered that and nodded. “Well, in any case, now that Pete's got everybody looking away from us, he's free to deploy his own little soldiers and come after us again, though I get the feeling he'll be a little more covert this time around. I'm sure he wants to get his hands on you—and probably even me—so we can help him rebuild this technology, which is obviously very powerful and…”

Jack stopped, staring at the horizon, though his eyes weren't really looking at the sky's colors changing from black to indigo.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

“Oh, shit,” he mumbled.

“What, Jack?”

“Hastings. I think I've just figured out what the son of a bitch is after.”

They stared at each other in semidarkness.

“Dimension jumps,” she said, her eyes widening. “That connects the observations we made at the house, from your strange fall through that storm to showing up at my doorstep five years after you died.”

“Yep. That's also why Hastings appeared at the Cape and brought his gurus along to screw with the suit and incorporate whatever that piece of glass is.”

She stared at him awhile and said, “Hastings has much larger plans than simply dropping down on his enemies around the globe with orbital jumpers, Jack.”

“Exactly, but why use me for the first dimension jump? Was it because he wasn't sure if it would work?”

“Possibly,” she said. “Maybe he needed a test run.”

“Sure, but once I jumped and crossed over, I would be beyond his reach. If his intention was to send his own army of orbital jumpers to this Earth—for whatever reasons—then me being here ahead of his own team makes me a liability.”

“Unless you were never supposed to make it,” she offered.

“What do you mean?”

“The descent profile change. The one I … Angela in your world ultimately chose, Alpha-G, resulted in a convergence of the harmonic of twelve across all energy levels. Alpha-B wouldn't have accomplished such a unique alignment of energy conversions. You would have certainly reached the right altitude of one hundred and twenty thousand feet, but either the outside temperature, or the G-forces, or the vertical velocity would have been off.”

Jack considered that while scanning the gauges, verifying heading and speed.

“But,” he finally said, “the purple haze began well before I chose a descent profile. The portal was starting to get activated miles before I reached that energy alignment.”

“And I think that's where this comes in,” she said, holding the glass token. “Somehow—and believe me, I
will
figure it out—this little gadget, combined with the energy alignment of Alpha-G, did the trick.”

“If that's the case, then why did Hastings plant this in my suit and then insist on Alpha-B? Did he just want me to get close enough to the dimensional jump to check his technology, but without actually doing it?”

“Maybe, but I don't have enough information to answer that,” the scientist in her said. “But I believe I will after I get this into the right hands.”

Jack rubbed the tips of his fingers against his sore chest and continued monitoring the gauges as the Tiara's hull fought the swells, putting more distance between them and the search vessels, buying them time to think, to theorize, to piece together how in the world he had managed to achieve what he was certain no other human being had ever done.

And as hues of orange and yellow-gold began to stain the indigo horizon—as Jack stared at his very first sunrise in this new world—his mind desperately clung to the hope that somewhere past the looming sun, somewhere beyond the span of time and space, his wife was also hard at work unraveling this mystery, applying all of her skills, her training, her experience—everything locked inside that brilliant mind of hers—to help him find a way back home.

Somehow.

*   *   *

Angela sipped an energy drink while staring at the clouds over central Florida from the back porch of Dr. Olivia Wiltz's home in Melbourne, which faced the woods leading to her old alma mater, the campus of the Florida Institute of Technology.

The first round with Olivia hadn't gone well. The woman was obviously scared out of her mind not just for her own safety, but for that of her daughter, Erika, and she had basically clammed up, demanding protection before releasing any information.

Problem was, Angela couldn't guarantee her own damned safety, much less that of this woman and her ten-year-old daughter.

But none of that changed the fact that she still needed answers, needed access to the information locked inside Olivia's head.

“How do you want to play this, Angie?” asked Dago as he stepped outside. She had left him keeping an eye on the Swiss scientist, along with Art-Z. And to keep a low profile, just as they had done at Pete's house, the rest of Dago's Paradise gang was back at a nearby motel.

She tilted her head and frowned.

“That lady looks pretty shaken up in there,” he added.

“Still. I need to know what happened to Jack,” Angela finally said. “And that pale skinny bitch knows
exactly
what went down during the jump.”

“So,” Dago asked, hands in front of him, palms facing up. “Again, how do you want to play this? She ain't gonna talk until her daughter's safe.”