The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller

by Pierre Ouellette

  ***

  Johnny stands alone in the parking lot of the aviation center, which now appears closed for the day.

  Even in high-end private aviation, business isn’t what it once was. He watches the jet in the distance as it turns onto the main runway and rotates for takeoff.

  The plane will never reach New York. It seems so very clear to him. The key players possessing the key knowledge to the key science: All on the same flight. All suddenly gone. And if the plane crashes, who’s left who knows? Only the old man and Arjun Khan and Crampton, the director at the Institute. That’s why the corporate paperwork was never modified on Johnny’s behalf. There was no need. There would be no company.

  But what if he’s wrong? What if the deal goes ahead just as the old man outlined? What then? He’ll look like a grandstanding fool, a slave to the great tidal forces that tear at the core of his soul.

  He stands in a puddle of agony and doubt. Just like so many times before. Then he hears the plane’s engines rise to a howl.

  The aircraft’s right tire spins madly as the jet surges past V1, the velocity of no return. All the while, pressurized nitrogen blows out of the rubber sidewall where the sniper’s bullet has already entered. A wave forms in the tread, a violent ripple that feeds off the friction of its contact with the runway. The temperature soars. The tire explodes. Fragments fly up and back into the right engine.

  The pilots feel the blast and the lurch as the engine fails. Too late. The jet surges ahead at over 160 miles per hour, far too fast to stop. It pulls violently to the right from the drag of the failed wheel. It leaves the runway and sleds across the dry grass toward a curve in an expressway filled with traffic.

  An articulated bus rounds the curve, two buses joined into one by a flexible centerpiece. It carries maintenance people from the Chip Mill, those who man the mops, the scrubbers, the buffers, the leaf blowers. It’s just after quitting time. The bus is packed.

  Inside, a chorus of screams goes up from those with window seats facing the airport. Passengers crammed into the aisle bend to see what’s causing the commotion. They’re dead before they can even get a glimpse.

  The plane collides with the bus just to the front of center. Its speed upon impact is over 100 miles per hour. Twenty-six thousand pounds of aviation fuel instantly ignite, with horrific consequence.

  Johnny has an unobstructed view of the fireball from his vantage point in the parking lot. It rises over a half mile from where he stands. The distance throws the dirty orange boil into abstraction. It permits him to focus on a more immediate catastrophe. They want him dead. If not now, as soon as possible.

  Maybe Lane can help. Just like always. He reaches for his handheld, and stops. Maybe Lane can’t help. Maybe it’s bigger than the both of them.

  He turns away from catastrophe and trots toward his car. He needs to act quickly, preemptively; before they figure out he’s still alive. The germ of a plan presents itself to him. If he can pull it off, he’ll expose the entire operation and gain sanctuary. If he fails, he’s as good as dead.

  Chapter 4

  Lucky Day

  Lane looks at his naked reflection in the smoke-tinted bedroom window thirty-two floors up in the Trade Ring. For someone well past forty, he’s holding his own. He glances back at the king-size bed, where a nude woman slumbers entwined in the silk sheets. She’s rich, kinky, and has a thing for cops.

  He considers his expertly bandaged arm. Very nice work. Very spendy work. It pretty much cleaned him out, just like he thought it would. His paramour had picked right up on the dressing, and had to hear the whole story in great detail. She particularly liked the young hooker and violent Bad Boys. The part Lane liked most was that the pain was now gone.

  He quietly slips on his clothes and heads for the door. No need to wake her up. The truth is, he doesn’t really have anything to say to her anyway.

  On his way out, he spots the note. It droops down from an antique vase that secures it to a marble tabletop. “For Your Arm.” A vertical arrow points up to an envelope leaning against the vessel’s elegant, glazed curve. Lane opens it. A neat row of hundred-dollar bills stares out at him. She knew. She knew he didn’t have insurance. She knew he couldn’t afford it. She knew by the scuffs on his shoes. She knew by the coarse weave of his shirts. She knew by the cheap watch, the bargain ties, the outmoded handheld.

  He closes the envelope slowly and deliberately, and places it back where he found it. His sexuality might be negotiable. The rest of him is still private property.

  As he leaves, he takes one last look at the urban vista out the big picture windows.

  At the very least, he’ll miss the view.

  An insistent drizzle falls from the bottom of an overcast sky as Lane walks down the transit mall through the long string of buses that collect workers off the sidewalks. The wet air beats down the blue diesel exhaust and mutes the low growls of the idling engines.

  He stops and buys a coffee at a little shop on the corner and drinks it standing up at the counter. His visit from the Bird represents a serious complication for him. The Bird’s job offer cuts both ways. From now on, if he goes into the Middle East representing the city and the Bad Boys catch him, he’s dead on the spot.

  A depressing development. He suddenly feels extremely weary. Time to go home. He catches a streetcar and slumps into his seat as it rolls through downtown to his apartment, which faces the entrance to Multnomah Stadium.

  Lane stares out his living room window at the dying day. The pavement and sidewalk glow with a wet sheen. He lights a cigarette, inhales, and blows out a blue cloud. His lights are off, so the smoke captures the exterior illumination and curls about itself in a rising plume. The only sound is the distant and grumpy murmur of the city grinding through its daily gears.

  He looks up from the street to a backlit HDX billboard pitching vacation getaways. A small boat, a skiff, sits beached on the white sand of a tropical lagoon. Its shipped oars point skyward to the bluest of blues.

  And then it comes.

  Fuller Bay.

  It’s the same boat, he’s sure of it, the same design. Only the colors are different. And the great span of years.

  He closes his eyes and sees the skiff rocking in the water, tied to the piling, which is hopelessly encrusted with barnacles. It couldn’t have been much more than six feet in length. Squared at both ends, its outer hull is a robin’s egg blue, with the inside done in white. Bright orange life jackets peek out from under the backseat, still wet from the last outing. They emit little clouds of steam in the early summer sun. You had to wear the life jackets. No exceptions. If your mom caught you without them, you couldn’t use the boat for the rest of the trip, and she has an excellent view of the water, so you are almost always in plain sight.

  She watches from the porch of their summer cabin built from aging logs, with a granite fireplace and old rugs of Native American origin hung as tapestries on the interior walls. It looks out over Fuller Bay, which is only a couple of hundred yards across, with a long sand spit that keeps out the big waters of Puget Sound. The skyline of downtown Seattle peeks over the far shore, like a distant urban dream.

  Lane guides the skiff toward the graveled shore below the sloping lawn in front of the cabin. At twelve years old, he does all the rowing and navigating. At ten years old, Johnny simply rides and fidgets. But today, Johnny does something more. He tows a spent fish off the stern on a short line, an ocean perch that sends flashes of silver through the green wake. A prize of considerable import. The biggest fish they’ve ever landed.

  Lane worries that Johnny will do something stupid and the fish will somehow float free. “You better not lose it, or I’ll lose you.”

  Johnny ignores him and makes a kind of engine sound as the inert body of the fish spins lazily on its path through the water.

  When they reach the shore, Lane moors the boat to the gnarled root of an upended tree stump, the deposition of some ancient winter storm. Ants swarm over its bleach
ed grain.

  They cross the narrow beach and climb the stairs to the yard below the cabin. When they reach the top, Lane turns to make sure the boat is properly secured. And that’s when he sees it, in the open water of the sound, just outside the bay. A yacht. Its gleaming white hull, forty meters long, floats broadside to the sun.

  “Johnny,” Lane says quietly as he tries to damp his excitement.

  “Yeah?” Johnny replies as he stares at his fish dangling from the end of the leader.

  “I said this was going to be our lucky day, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, that’s what you said, all right.”

  “And you didn’t believe me, did you?”

  “Not really,” Johnny answers without looking up.

  “Like, you didn’t believe me when I said the thing about the yacht.”

  “What thing?”

  “That we might get one today.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember.”

  “Did you believe me?” Lane asks casually. He is savoring the buildup immensely, but now it’s time to let loose.

  “No.”

  “Well then, look where I’m lookin’, then tell me what you believe.”

  Johnny turns his head toward the water, freezes for a moment, then his eyes open wide. “Oh my god!” he exclaims breathlessly, and he looks up to Lane. “What are we gonna do?”

  “What do you think we’re gonna do?” Lane asks smugly.

  “We’re gonna check it out?”

  “Yeah, we’re gonna check it out.”

  They scamper down the stairs to the boat, where they put the life jackets back on.

  “You want to bad-mouth our lucky day anymore?” Lane asks. He buckles a sodden strap around his waist. “Well, do you?”

  “Nope,” Johnny answers sheepishly as he pokes his arm into his jacket’s shoulder piece.

  “Good.” Lane unties the mooring while Johnny climbs aboard and wiggles into his life jacket. Lane coils in the rope, pushes them off, and hops in. The boat pitches vigorously as he takes his place in the rowing seat. He grabs the oars and dips them into the water. Their grand expedition is officially under way. His back and belly strain as he rows at a lively pace away from shore. He can hear the water rush under the flat keel as the boat cuts a rippling wake through the calm water.

  The shore recedes, and when his arms tire, he retracts the oars and turns toward the bow to check their course. Johnny kneels in the front seat, his head held erect to get the best view possible. Lane dips the left oar in and pulls lightly to aim them at the inner shore of the sand spit, near the tip of its thrust between the waters of the bay and the open sound.

  “How we gonna do it?” Johnny asks as Lane resumes rowing with vigorous strokes.

  “We’re gonna put in on the spit and then walk around to the far side, so we see can see it.”

  “What if they see us?” Johnny asks, a little worried.

  “So what if they see us? It’s a free country, isn’t it?”

  “Well, I guess so,” Johnny says, not entirely convinced.

  As they close on the sand spit, they can make out more detail in its twisted, knotted mass of wood, all leached of color and burnished by wind and sand. It creeps down to a steep and narrow beach of virgin sand. By now they have lost sight of the yacht’s mighty superstructure, which is hidden behind the wall of driftwood. Lane pauses once more to check their bearing. In doing so, he looks at the mouth of the bay, a narrow passage of water less than a hundred yards wide that runs between the end of the sand spit on one side and a marsh full of cattails and reed grass on the other.

  “Do you think it has a pool table inside?” Johnny asks.

  But Lane doesn’t answer. He is looking beyond the bay, out into the open sound, at the vast stretch of unobstructed water that terminates miles away against the buildings of the Seattle skyline.

  Don’t ever leave the bay. Not ever. Don’t ever go out into the sound.

  It was the second-biggest rule, right behind the life jacket rule. If you disobeyed, the consequences were almost unimaginable. Lane looks back toward the cabin, which is a small, brown rectangle against the looming old-growth forest behind it. But even at this distance, his sharp eyes can tell that no one is out on the porch, no one is watching. Then he turns back to the sand spit and the mouth of the bay.

  What if they crossed the mouth, and then hugged the sound side of the sand spit until they were lined up with the yacht? Then they could row out a little closer, maybe twenty-five yards, where they could get a really good look, the look of a lifetime.

  Only on this luckiest of days would he even consider such a plan. It takes only another moment to justify it: They weren’t really going into the sound. They were just following the shoreline and then ducking out for just a minute, that’s all.

  “Hey, wake up!” Johnny interrupts. “What about the pool table?”

  “What about it?” Lane asks as he takes to the oars once again. It’s better just to do it and not tell Johnny. Otherwise, he’ll freak out for sure.

  “Do you think they’ve got one?” Johnny asks impatiently.

  “Yeah. Down in some big room below decks,” Lane replies. He is quickly closing the distance to the mouth. The green water of the bay dances with diamonds in the afternoon sun. A gentle breeze blows crab and kelp across his nostrils. His oars bite the water in perfect synchrony and push the boat forward in long, easy pulses.

  He twists his head and sees that the stern of the great boat is now visible around the edge of the dead forest of sand and driftwood. His young eyes quickly resolve the block lettering painted in black on the stern, and the vessel’s name jumps out at him:

  The Eternal Heart.

  Then he turns back and notices that they’re nearing the outer edge of the mouth, the point of no return, and doing so much faster than he’d anticipated. He looks to his left and sees the marshy shore rapidly passing by. Way too quickly. What happened?

  The tide.

  Oh Jesus! He’d forgotten about the tide. When the tide changed from high to low, maybe half the volume of the water in the bay was forced out through this single inlet. His father had explained it once, when they were roasting marshmallows in the cabin’s stone fireplace stuffed under the grizzly’s head. The force of the outgoing water created a powerful current, and it went on for hours and hours. And now the current would expel them like a tiny twig out into the open waters, the big, choppy waters that went on forever. And there would be no way to get back.

  Suddenly, this lucky day, which had expanded to the very edge of his vision, this luckiest of all days implodes into a hard ball of almost unbearable density.

  Lane lifts one oar, and rows mightily with the other to turn the skiff around. They’ve got to get back. Now.

  “Hey! Whatya doing?” Johnny cries as he catches his balance while the boat heaves around.

  “The tide,” Lane gasps. “I forgot about the tide.”

  “What do you mean?” Johnny asks worriedly. He has already caught a whiff of his brother’s fear.

  “We gotta get back,” Lane mumbles as he completes the turn and starts frantically rowing back into the bay.

  “How come?” Johnny asks from behind him.

  “If we don’t, we’ll get swept out.”

  “Swept out?”

  “Yeah,” Lane replies with angry anxiety. “Swept out.” As he pulls on the oars, he looks over at the marsh shore. Stationary. They are making no progress. He is simply rowing in place against the current.

  “You mean we won’t get back?” Johnny asks with a quiver in his little voice.

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” puffs Lane. “Now shut up so I can row!” He checks the shore, desperately searching for a reference point to measure their progress. He spots a bit of broken branch, then centers himself to maximize his rowing power. The great tidal current surges under the keel of the skiff with a soft but relentless rush.

  Lane waits for what seems the longest of times, and rechecks the pos
ition of the broken branch on shore. They’ve gained maybe a foot, if they’ve gained anything at all.

  “I’m scared, Lane,” comes the sob from Johnny behind him. “I’m really, really scared.”

  “I know,” Lane responds as calmly as he can. He digs the oars in even deeper. His arms ache, his shoulders hurt, his belly burns. He checks the branch again. They’ve gotten nowhere. Sick with fear, he rows on, prolonging the inevitable.

  He is down to his final reserves of will and strength when he hears the motorboat approaching. His arms and shoulders throb in agony as the people on the boat throw a rope to Johnny. He barely notices.

  It’s over. Their lucky day wasn’t quite so lucky after all.

  Lane turns away from the billboard and the boat and looks back into the interior of his apartment. Fuller Bay recedes into the distant past.

  He has the sound down on the Feed, but it visually screams about some kind of airplane crash. The Feed loves disasters. He’s not interested, especially this evening. He turns it off and fixes himself a whiskey and soda.

  Chapter 5

  Prince Vegas

  Northeastern Oregon—Desert Country

  “You really didn’t need to come along,” Arjun tells Zed. “I can handle it.”

  “Handle it, huh?” Zed spits back. “If things were being handled, we wouldn’t even be here.” The old man looks out into the night through one of the van’s armored windows. The dim outline of a flat, arid plain rolls by as they travel eastward. Road signs creep up, then vanish in brief flashes of brilliant green and white.

  “Let me get this straight,” Zed says. “First, he got off the plane. Second, he slipped in up on Tabor. Third, he left with proof positive. Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “So how in the hell did he get past the gate and up and into the lab?”

  “A procedural error. Before we arranged the crash, he had a Type A security clearance on his access card. We had no idea that he’d survived, and he managed to get in and out with the van before we canceled it.”