The Expanding Universe

by Craig Martelle

  Lance stared up at the yellow brick battleship of a building. He had already noted that there were no exterior surveillance cameras. He now noted with relief that there were no climbable drainpipes, fire escapes, or other means of entry for an aspiring James Bond.

  If Kuldeep couldn’t get in, where would he have gone?

  Lance went around the back of the building once more. This put him on the downhill side of the facility. The back of the telescope array showed through the trees, metal gantries pale in the dark.

  On an impulse, he picked his way downhill over the rough ground.

  The radio reflector panels composing the 600-meter ring were as high as houses. A gap between them led into the ring.

  Although it was night, the sky had a bellyful of snow and the pale clouds gave some visibility.

  Footprints marked the pristine snow cover on the ground.

  Lance followed the prints into the center of the ring, unzipping his parka as he walked, reaching into the warmth where his gun waited.

  He found Kuldeep on the ground, a stone’s throw from the main antenna. Kuldeep sat on his haunches, hugging his closed laptop, rocking back and forth.

  “Creeping cheetos, man! What the fudge are you doing out here?”

  Kuldeep looked up at him blankly, as if unsure who he was. “Sssh!”

  The imperative tone of his command shut Lance up. He followed Kuldeep’s gaze upwards, to the sky.

  Clouds.

  Beyond the clouds, the infinite abyss of space.

  Wheeeooooeeeew.

  Was he imagining the faint whine in his ears, as if his body had become a radio receiver, amplifying the signal received on October 16th, which had landed in history like the Chixculub Meteor, without a splash, with an impact so great—although yet to be experienced in its entirety—that this place was still echoing it back on some psychic wavelength?

  This is the way, this is the way the world ends.

  Not with a bang but with a whine.

  Lance looked around at the distant petals of the radio reflectors, ringing them in. His Scots-Irish heritage spoke up in his brain. Stone circle. Right in the middle. Not good not good. Get out of the FUCKING circle.

  “Wheeeeooooowwww…”

  Kuldeep’s lips were parted. The faint whine came from him.

  Lance grabbed Kuldeep under the arms. He dragged him to his feet. Kuldeep’s laptop fell to the ground. Lance snatched it up in one hand, got his other arm around Kuldeep’s waist.

  “Walk.”

  “Shut up. I can’t hear.”

  “WALK!”

  At first Kuldeep had to be dragged, his feet sliding sideways. After a few yards, he consented to stumble along under his own power. Lance cringed as they walked, as if he had made it to Afghanistan after all, as if he were scurrying, burdened, away from some cosmic sniper.

  They cleared the circle. Back out in the woods, the tension lifted off Lance’s shoulders.

  Dad-gummit. The night is getting into my head.

  Then there was the ordinary tension of sneaking back into the guest-house and seeing to Kuldeep. He must have been out there for hours. His hands and feet were like blocks of ice. On the bright side, frozen diarrhea smelled less awful than fresh. Lance got him changed into some of his own clean gear, which swallowed Kuldeep’s slight body. Giving up on the idea of running a bath—the ‘hot’ water was barely warm—he rubbed Kuldeep’s hands and feet with duty-free vodka.

  It was quite a while before Kuldeep said anything besides “I’m cold,” and “Sorry, man.” When he did, it was “My laptop.”

  “What about it?” Lance kept rubbing Kuldeep’s right foot with a scratchy guest-house towel. “By the way, you owe me a bottle of vodka.”

  “I just want to make sure …” Nothing would do but that Lance booted up the laptop for him.

  All Kuldeep’s files were gone.

  The laptop’s hard drive was blank.

  * * *

  “I did not wipe it,” Kuldeep insisted, lying in bed. “The Agency must’ve wiped it remotely while I had the satphone connection running.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Destroying the evidence,” Kuldeep said, as if this should be obvious.

  Lance rolled his shoulders, stiff after a couple hours of sleep in a chair in Kuldeep’s room. What was obvious to him was that Kuldeep would wind up in hospital if he didn’t rest and recuperate. They were scheduled to leave today. He went down the hall and called Phyllis at the office.

  A man’s deep voice said, “Flaherty here.”

  Lance held his phone away from his head to visually check the number. He hadn’t misdialed. “Who the f—freak is this?”

  “Is this Lance Garner I’m talking with?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you were calling for Ms. Hoskins, I am sorry to inform you she’s not available at the present time. But I—”

  “Why isn’t she available? Where is she?”

  “Hospital, son. Don’t worry, she’s gonna be OK.”

  “What happened?”

  “She fell on those steps out front. Fractured her hip.” Lance closed his eyes, recalling the rainy day when Phyllis had slipped on those very same steps. This time, he hadn’t been there to catch her. “When I stopped by to see her earlier, she just came out of surgery, so she wasn’t real talkative, but she told me, ‘Take good care of my boys.’ I guess that’s you and Mr. Srivastava. I was gonna call you in a while. What time is it there? Can’t be past the crack of ass.”

  “Didn’t catch your name,” Lance said warily.

  “Tom Flaherty. Just to be clear, I’m standing in for Ms. Hoskins while she’s recovering, with the expectation she will be returning to work shortly.”

  Lance knew how feeble that expectation was. At Phyllis’s age, a hip fracture could be a death sentence. She certainly wouldn’t be returning to work for months, if ever.

  So, he had to work with this Flaherty, who sounded like him when he wasn’t trying to hide it.

  He took a deep breath, and decided not to mention Kuldeep’s nocturnal adventure. It would make them both look unprofessional, and it had nothing to do with the operation. Did it? No, it did not. Kuldeep’s food-poisoning episode? Ditto. All the Kulster needed was rest, anyway. Their journey back to the States would be arduous for him, but there was no alternative.

  “Can I assume you’re up to speed on the situation?” he asked Flaherty.

  “I’ve read all the materials you sent to Ms. Hoskins.”

  “She may not have made a note of this, but I asked her to slap a gag order on the researchers from Arecibo.” Lance mentally apologized to Phyllis. “She said she would get that done. I wonder if she had time to put it in process?”

  “A gag order? I don’t see any record of that. But as you probably know, a gag order would take time to obtain. We have to go through the proper channels to make it stick.”

  “If they run to the media with this—” Lance started, boiling over.

  “No, no, we can’t let that happen. I am fully in agreement with you there.”

  Lance raised his eyebrows. That was something.

  “I’ll get that court order, but it will take time is what I’m saying. Right now, here’s what you do.”

  Lance waited. As Flaherty told him what to do, he felt a rush of fear. He sat down on the hard foot of his bed.

  “You’re leaving out of there today, correct?” Flaherty said.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you got time to take care of that before you catch your plane. You’re gonna make one other stop on your way home,” Flaherty mentioned casually. “I’ll email you the new tickets.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re going to Italy.”

  Italy? What for? Lance opened his mouth to say they couldn’t go to Italy. Kuldeep needed to go home and take a week off work and lie on the sofa watching reruns and drinking chicken noodle soup. Then he closed his mouth again. It was too late. If he was going to me
ntion Kuldeep’s condition, he should have done it earlier. “You got it,” he said flatly.

  * * *

  By the time the minibus delivered them to the one-horse airport at Mineralye Vodi, Kuldeep looked like he was about ready to check out of this world and move on to the big clambake in the sky. The toxic atmosphere on the bus couldn’t have helped. The Arecibo researchers had spent the whole ride stewing about their wiped hard drives.

  It had been easy as pie. Kuldeep had already phished the scientists, on the way here, by getting them to open an email with a virus attachment. The virus enabled remote access to their computers. All Lance had to do was run the same program, hook into their C drives, and give the DELETE key a workout. Sure, a specialist could recover their files, but by the time the scientists got around to that, they would be gagged by court order. In the meantime, they couldn’t very well go to the media without a single byte of data to back up their story.

  To pull it off, Lance had had to wake Kuldeep up to tell him how to run the program. Then he’d moseyed over to the laboratory while the researchers were having their final meeting with the Russians. Laptops in a box in the hall. There’d been one terrifying moment when the lead Russian astronomer, Zhigunov, came out of the room and saw Lance squatting against the wall, typing on his own laptop. But all Zhigunov had done was smirk at him. “It’s going well?”

  “Not too bad,” Lance had replied. And that had been that.

  Lance had a suspicion that Zhigunov knew what he’d done, more or less. And approved. The Russians understood the dark power of information.

  At Moscow airport, Lance and Kuldeep parted from the Arecibo gang with barely-masked relief on both sides. The scientists went home to scan the skies, and Lance and Kuldeep flew to Naples.

  By the time they got there—almost 48 hours after their departure from Zelenchukskaya—Kuldeep was running a temperature. Lance bought a thermometer at the airport. “Thirty-eight point three, what’s that in Fahrenheit?”

  “I’m fine,” Kuldeep said. “I’m coming with you. What would Phyllis say if I wimped out?”

  Lance had not told him about Phyllis’s accident and hospitalization. There’d be time enough for him to find out when they got home. So for the time being, Kuldeep believed Phyllis had sent them on this side trip—not the enigmatic Flaherty.

  Regardless of where the idea came from, it seemed like a long shot to Lance. But he understood the need to confirm everything. Even good old Hector Quintanilla had stressed the importance of witness documentation. So with a determinedly chipper Kuldeep in tow, he headed out of their hotel to the Piazza Garibaldi.

  Man, but this city stank.

  Literally, a smell of toilets hung in the air.

  Maybe it came from Mt. Vesuvius? The famous volcano loomed over the city, its twin peaks still lit ocher by the sunset.

  But no, Lance discovered as they wandered through the back streets behind the train station. The smell came from Naples itself. Some of the alleys were cordoned off, heaped high with garbage. This city was an open-air rubbish dump. At last, they’d stumbled on someplace that made the rural South look like a model of cleanliness and order. “This is fucking disgusting,” Kuldeep said, voicing Lance’s thoughts.

  Yet Lance said, “You wanted to come.”

  He’d left his watch and credit cards in the safe in their hotel room, per Flaherty’s advice. His gun was in the under-arm holster, concealed by a zip-up hoodie. Pickpockets better not mess with Lance Garner.

  Marking them down for tourists, ‘helpful’ locals buzzed around, offering guide services, girls, boys, drugs … “Hey, maybe you could help us out,” Lance said, producing a dazzling smile. “We’re stationed up the coast, you know? Sixth Fleet? Just wanna kick back, have a couple of beers. Where would you recommend?”

  Yes, yes, I guide you, very buono, lots of bella girls.

  Lance and Kuldeep weren’t servicemen, of course. But they wanted to go where the servicemen were.

  Their guide led them into a chaotic nightlife quarter. Music blasted. Broken glass crunched underfoot. Lance spotted several groups of obvious American sailors. “Perfect,” he said, shoving euros into their guide’s hand to get rid of him. He inhaled the miasma of cigarette smoke that shrouded the outdoor tables and chairs, relishing a sense of multiplying possibilities. This was the part of the job he absolutely loved. The part where he got to be anonymous.

  The problem was Kuldeep.

  He was swaying, his eyes glassy, looking spaced out. Lance hated to even think what his temperature probably was, and he felt angry with him for not staying at the hotel.

  But it was too late to worry about that now. Anyway, Kuldeep didn’t have to do much talking.

  They had an established double act for the rare occasions when they got to go out in the field. They were in sales—boring! Internet sales—boring and incomprehensible!

  Kuldeep’s role was to spout off authentically if their target actually showed an interest in their supposed jobs.

  But Harvey, Mike, Devaughn, and Rob, twenty-year-old sailors off the USS Gravely, didn’t even ask what these two casually clad Americans, one brown, one white, were doing in Naples. Gaining their trust was as easy as buying them a pitcher and cracking some jokes about the filthiness of this city. Then Lance tossed out the line Flaherty had set him up with. “Yo, I saw what happened on the news. Y’all see that mess?”

  They had seen it with their own eyes, not a mile away across the gray waters of the Mediterranean, all except Rob who had been stuck in Food Services, and was still pissed at having missed it.

  “This Russian ship, yo—”

  “A corvette.”

  “Tarantul class.”

  “They were shadowing us, OK? Way too close. I thought they were gonna ram us at one point.”

  The US Sixth Fleet and the Georgian Navy, such as it was, had recently conducted joint exercises in the Black Sea. An exercise in bear-poking, was what that was. The poked bear had duly reacted.

  “They musta sent half the Black Sea Fleet just to follow us around.”

  “The Black Sea Fleet ain’t shit.”

  “Man, those boats hardly even stay on top of the water.”

  “That carrier they got is so old, the only planes you can land on her are biplanes.”

  There followed a lengthy tangent of dissing the Russian navy. Lance laughed along with them, not trying to direct the conversation. He knew they’d get back to the point soon.

  “So this Tarantul class—“

  “It was a Stereguchiy class.”

  “Naw man, it was a Tarantul.”

  “It launched a missile!”

  “No fucking way!” Lance said. He was allowing himself cuss-words for the evening, to stay in character. “At you?”

  “Yo man, that’s what I thought. I was all like, whoa shit!”

  “We went to battle stations.”

  “And then, I was up on deck and I saw this, smoke starts coming out of the Moskva!”

  “The Moskva?” Lance exclaimed. “You’re kidding! They hit their own flagship?”

  “Yeah, man!” The young sailors could hardly speak for laughing. “It was a misfire or some shit. That was in the news, for real?”

  “Shee-yit,” Lance said. “Yeah. I saw it on the internet, but they didn’t say what happened.”

  “Well, that’s what happened. Friendly fire.”

  “Know what, man, it was lucky they hit their own ship. If that was one of ours, World War Three woulda started on October sixteen, two thousand and eleven.” Devaughn nodded sagely.

  October 16th.

  Yes, the CIA already had SIGINT recording the puzzling behavior of the Black Sea Fleet. But the testimony of the young sailors filled in the crucial blank: what had happened to make the Moskva turn tail and steam back to its home port? This had happened: a Russian corvette had fired on its own flagship.

  On October 16th.

  Must’ve been a Tarantul class.

  Those
old missile corvettes dated back to the Soviet era. Decaying electronics. Old missiles. Just waiting to be launched by a 204 GHz signal that zipped down from the sky. Like opening someone else’s garage door.

  “That is some scary shit,” Lance said. “Can I buy y’all another brewski to thank you for not starting World War Three?”

  Kuldeep was barely hanging in there. He hadn’t touched his beer. Lance leaned over to him while their fresh-faced companions bragged about how they would win World War Three, just give them a chance. “Why don’t you head back?”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Kuldeep said, pushing his chair back as he spoke.

  “I’m gonna hang out here a while. See if these guys got anything else to say, or I might talk to some other people. Be careful you don’t get pickpocketed.”

  “Roger,” Kuldeep said. He mustered a final spurt of nerdish bonhomie as he said his goodbyes.

  Lance hung out with the sailors longer than he probably should’ve. He was having fun, was the truth. His anonymous persona more closely resembled the original Lance, from Calhoun County, than did the colorless CIA officer that he impersonated most of the time. A good ol’ boy with a brain two standard deviations above average. Play me some Guns ‘n’ Roses. C’mere, bellacita, looking fine. Who-ho-ho, sweet child of mine. But where do we go? Where do we go from here? Who am I really? His original self had turned into an act. He did shots and fooled around on the cramped dance floor, moshing like it was 1999, while the cold core of him checked the time impatiently, knowing that something big was happening, something that had already come within a nautical mile of starting World War III.

  At midnight he tore himself away and hailed a taxi to get back to their hotel.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket as the insane driver flung the taxi through the narrow streets.

  The office.

  “‘Sup,” he slurred.

  “Lance?”

  “Yeah sir.” Scrabbling for sobriety.

  “This is Flaherty. I just spoke with Kuldeep on the phone.”

  “He OK?”

  “You sound like you’re drunk. Lance, are you drunk?”