Against the backdrop of piped-in seasonal Muzak and gaudy tinsel decorations, some people were talking animatedly on their cell phones, others waving friends over to join them. Despite being heavily laden with a pile of dry cleaning and his gym bag, Bellinger veered toward the store, wondering what all the fuss was about. Instinctively, he flinched at the possibility of another horror, another 9/11-like catastrophe, images of that terrible day still seared into his mind—although, he quickly thought, today’s crowd didn’t have that vibe to it. They weren’t horrified. They seemed enthralled.
He got as close as he could and peered over the heads and shoulders of the gathered people. As per usual, the screens were all tuned to the same channel, in this case a news network. The image they showed drew his eye immediately, and he didn’t quite understand what he was looking at—a spherical light, hovering over what seemed like one of the polar regions, confirmed by the banner underneath. He was watching it with piqued curiosity, in a detached trance, catching snippets of the animated comments bouncing around him, when his cell phone trilled. He groaned and juggled his bag and laundry around to fish it out of his pocket. Groaned doubly when he saw who was calling.
“Dude, where are you? I just tried your landline.” Csaba—pronounced Tchaba, nicknamed “Jabba,” for not-too-subtle reasons—sounded overly excited. Which wasn’t unusual. The big guy had a hearty appetite for life—and pretty much everything else.
“I’m at the mall,” Bellinger replied, still angling for a clearer view of the screens.
“Go home and put the news on, quick. You’re not gonna believe this.”
Jabba, excited about something on TV. Not exactly breaking news. Although this time—just this once, Bellinger thought—his exuberance seemed justified.
A brilliant chemical engineer of Hungarian extraction who worked with Bellinger at the Rowland Materials Research Laboratory, Csaba Komlosy had a passion for all things televisual. Well-made, high-concept shows were normally his turf, the kind of show where a gutsy and intense government agent repeatedly managed to save the nation from mass destruction or where a gutsy and intense architect repeatedly managed to break out of the most escape-proof prisons. Lately, though, Csaba had veered into seedier territory. He’d embraced the netherworld of unscripted television—reality TV, so-called despite the fact that it had little to do with reality, or with being unscripted, for that matter—and, much to Bellinger’s chagrin, he really liked to share the more singularly sublime moments of his viewing.
In this case, though, Bellinger was ready to give him a free pass. Still, he couldn’t resist a little dig. “Since when do you watch the news?”
“Would you stop with the inquisition and put the damn thing on,” Jabba protested.
“I’m looking at it right now. I’m at the mall, outside Best Buy.” Bellinger’s voice trailed off as some heads in front of him shifted and the image on the screen snared his attention again. He caught sight of a banner at the bottom of screen, which read, “Unexplained phenomenon over Antarctica.” There was also a small “Live” box in the upper right corner. He just stood there, transfixed, his eyes curiously processing what they were seeing. He recognized the reporter. He’d caught some of her specials over the years and remembered her reports from Thailand after the tsunami a few years back, when he’d first noticed her. Shallow as it sounded, the relative hotness of a TV newscaster was directly proportional to how much attention guys paid to the screen—especially if the news in question didn’t concern armed conflict, a sports result, or a celebrity meltdown. For most guys, Grace Logan—with the unforgiving green eyes, the tiny, mischievous mole poised just above the edge of her lips, the unsettlingly breathy yet earnest voice, the blond curls that always seemed to have a slightly unkempt tousle to them, and the Vargas Girl body that owed its curves to burgers and milkshakes, not silicone—ticked the hot box with ease.
This time, though, Bellinger’s eyes weren’t on her.
The camera zoomed in on the phenomenon again, sending an audible shiver through the crowd.
“Dude, it’s unreal,” Jabba exclaimed. “I can’t take my eyes off the screen.”
Bellinger couldn’t make sense of it. “Is this a joke?”
“Not according to them.”
“Where is this exactly?”
“West Antarctic ice sheet. They’re on some research ship off the coast. At first, I thought it’s got to be a stunt for a new movie, maybe Cameron or Emmerich or even Shyamalan, but none of them have a live project that fits.”
Jabba—film geek extraordinaire—would know.
“How long has it been up?” Bellinger asked.
“About ten minutes. It came on out of the blue while la Logan was yapping about the breakup of the ice shelf. First it was like this ball of light, then it morphed to a dark sphere—like that black planet in The Fifth Element, remember? Totally creeped me out.”
“Then it turned into this?”
“Yep.” The crunching sound coming through the receiver spurred Bellinger’s mind to picture the likely setting for his friend’s call: sunken deep in his couch, a bottle of Samuel Adams in one hand—not his first, Bellinger guessed, since they’d both left the lab over an hour ago—and a half-empty pack of sizzlin’ picante chips in the other. Which was why he was on speakerphone.
Bellinger’s brow wrinkled with concentration as he rubbed his baldpate. He’d never seen anything like it. More people were gathering around now, crowding around him, jostling for position.
Jabba crunched noisily into another chip, then asked, “So what do you think?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, as if in a daze. The crowd oohed as an airborne camera gave a closer look at the unexplained apparition. “How are they doing this?” he asked, cupping the phone’s mike area to cut out the noise around him. As a technology researcher and a scientist, his mind was instinctively skeptical and was immediately trying to figure out ways this could be done.
Jabba was obviously thinking along the same lines. “Must be some kind of laser effect. Remember those floating beads of light those guys were working on at Keio—”
“Laser-induced plasma emissions?” Bellinger interjected. They’d both seen press coverage of the recent invention at the Japanese university, where focused bursts from a laser projector heated up the air at specific points above the bulky device, causing tiny bursts of plasma emissions that “drew” small, three-dimensional shapes of white light in midair.
“Yeah, remember? The guy with the weird goggles and the white gloves—”
“No way,” Bellinger countered. “You’d need a generator the size of an aircraft carrier sitting right under it for something this big. Plus it wouldn’t explain the sustained brilliance or the way it’s so clearly defined.”
“All right, forget that. What about other kinds of projections? Spectral imagery?”
Bellinger stared closely at the screen. “You know something I don’t? ’Cause except for the droid in—which one’s the white one that looks like a fire hydrant?”
“R2-D2.” The roll of the eyes came through in his mocking tone as clearly as if they’d been using high-def webcams.
“Except for R2-D2, I don’t think 3-D projectors actually exist.”
Which was true. Something that could achieve a free-floating, un-contained, three-dimensional moving image, like in Princess Leia’s seminal “Help us, Obi-Wan” moment—of any size, let alone something this big—still eluded the best brains in the business.
“Besides, you’re forgetting one pesky little detail,” Bellinger added, feeling slightly more uncomfortable now.
“I know, dude. It’s daylight.” Jabba sounded spooked at having that realization reaffirmed.
“Not exactly projector-friendly, is it?”
“Nope.”
Bellinger felt uncomfortable having that discussion out there, surrounded by people, his gym bag and laundry inches from getting trampled. But he just couldn’t tear himself away.
“Okay, so we can forget about lasers and projectors,” he told Jabba. “I mean, look at it. It’s not contained within any kind of framework, it’s not boxed in, there’s no dark backdrop behind it, no glass panes around it. It’s just there, free-floating. In daylight.”
“Unless there are a couple of monster mirrors on either side of it they’re not showing us,” Jabba mused. “Hey, maybe it’s generated from space.”
“Nice idea, but how exactly?”
Jabba bit noisily into another chip. “I don’t know, dude. I mean, this thing doesn’t compute, does it?”
“No. Hang on,” Bellinger told him, as he jammed the phone between his ear and his shoulder, grabbed his belongings, and inched back a few steps, out of the ever-growing crowd.
He and Jabba bounced around several other ideas, throwing everything they could think of at it, trying to pin some sensible, plausible explanation on it, but nothing stuck. Bellinger’s excitement, though, soon gave way to a sense of unease. Something else was bothering him. An uncomfortable feeling that something buried deep within him was clawing for attention.
Suddenly, the fixed camera got jarred as an altercation took place on the ship’s deck. Jabba lapped it up, as did the crowd at the mall, whooping and joking as the people on the ship filming the sighting scuffled, then the aerial camera came back. It closed in on the apparition, which then faded away, only to then suddenly reappear directly over the ship. The crowd around Bellinger shrieked and recoiled in shock as the shaky upward shot from the handheld camera on deck sent a shock wave crackling through them.
“Son of a bitch,” Jabba blurted. “Is it turning?”
Bellinger focused on the apparition, now aware of a growing lump in his throat. “It’s spherical,” he marveled. “It’s not some kind of projection. It’s actually physical, isn’t it?”
On the screen, Grace Logan was having trouble keeping calm, clearly rattled by the apparition that was just hovering there, directly over the ship. The crowd in the mall was echoing her reaction, visibly stiffening and going quiet.
Jabba’s crunching had also stopped. “I think you’re right. But how . . . ? It’s not an object, and yet . . . It’s almost like the air itself is burning up, but . . . that’s not possible, is it? I mean, you can’t light air up, can you?”
Bellinger felt a sudden rush of blood to his temples. Something clicked. It just rushed in on him, unannounced, out of nowhere. Long-forgotten, dormant neurons buried deep within his brain had somehow managed to reach out and find each other and make a connection.
An unhappy one.
Oh, shit.
He went silent, his mind racing to process that link and take it to its natural conclusion, lost in the dread of the possibility just as the sign faded from view and the sky above the ship went back to normal.
“Dude, you there?”
Bellinger heard his voice go distant, as if he were on the outside watching himself answer. “Yeah.”
“What? What’re you thinking?”
He felt his skin crawl. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I get home. Let me know if you come up with anything.”
“Dude, hang on, don’t just—”
Bellinger hung up.
He stood there, his feet nailed to the cool tiled floor, the commotion around him fading as he turned his thoughts inward. Only minutes earlier, picking up the colorful linen shirts, all folded up and ready for packing, had conjured up a pleasant, warm feeling inside him. With the Christmas holiday days away, the sea, the sun, and the wide blue skies of the Dominican Republic beckoned—his annual pilgrimage, a welcome respite from the claustrophobic, windowless life he led at the research lab. Any feeling of warmth was now gone. A cold, crippling unease had taken its place and, Bellinger knew, wasn’t about to let go.
He just stood there for a few long minutes, contemplating the disturbing—and, he hoped, surely unlikely—idea that had clawed its way out from the darkest recesses of his mind.
No way, he thought. Be serious.
But he couldn’t shake the thought.
He stayed there as the TVs replayed the whole thing, lost in his thoughts as the crowd dissipated. He finally tore himself away from the screens, gathered his things, and drove home in silence.
No way.
He dumped his bags in his front hallway, decided to try and let it go and move onto other things, and headed for his fridge. He got himself a beer and went back to the hall and rifled through his mail, but it was no use.
He couldn’t shake it away.
He switched on his TV. The images it threw back at him were spine-tingling. Snarled traffic in Times Square, where a crowd of people had just frozen in place, mesmerized by the images of the sighting on the Sony JumboTron; people in bars and stadiums, on their feet, their eyes peeled on the screens; and similar chaotic images from around the world. He moved to his desk and fired up his laptop and spent a couple of hours scouring Internet chat rooms while flicking around various news reports, trying to get a clearer picture of what was going on, hoping to come across some ammo to dismiss his theory.
It was insane, outlandish . . . but it fit.
It just fit.
Which brought up an even bigger problem.
What to do about it.
His primal instinct told him to forget about it and leave it alone. Well alone. If what he was imagining was really happening, then he’d be far better off expunging any trace of the thought from his mind and never mentioning it to anyone. Which was the sensible thing to do, the rational thing to do, and Bellinger prided himself, above any other qualities he might have, on his rationality. But there was something else.
A friend had died. Not just a friend.
His best friend.
And that was something that his rationality was finding hard to ignore.
Visions of the tragic accident in the Skeleton Coast sparked in his mind’s eye, horrific images his imagination had conjured up long ago, after he’d been told about how Danny Sherwood had died.
He couldn’t ignore it.
He had to find out. Make sure. Get the whole picture.
He got himself another beer and sat alone in the dark living room, staring into nothing, his mind alternating between what he’d just seen and what had happened two years ago. A few bottles later, he retrieved his phone and scrolled down his contacts list until he found the entry he was looking for. It was a number he’d been given a couple of years ago, one he hadn’t called for almost that long.
He hesitated, then hit the call button.
He heard it ring through three, four times, then a man picked up.
“Who’s this?” The man’s tone had a detached, no-nonsense ring to it.
The sound of Matt Sherwood’s voice brought Bellinger a modicum of solace. A palpable connection, however fleeting, to his long-dead friend.
“It’s Vince. Vince Bellinger,” he answered, a slight hesitation in his voice. He paused for a beat, then added, “Where are you, Matt?”
“At my place. Why?”
“I need to see you, man,” Bellinger told him. “Like, now.”
Chapter 6
Boston, Massachusetts
No one in the crowded arena could tear their eyes away from the huge video scoreboards. Not the fans. Not the players. And certainly not anyone in Larry Rydell’s perfectly positioned luxury suite at the Garden.
His guests, the design team working on the groundbreaking electric car he hoped to launch within a couple of years, had been enjoying the treat. They’d spent the whole day in the project’s nerve center over in Waltham, bringing him up to speed on the car’s status, going over the problems they’d managed to solve and the new ones they’d unearthed. As with everything Rydell did, the project had world-beating ambitions. His friend Elon Musk—another Internet sensation, courtesy of a little online business he’d cofounded by the name of PayPal—had already launched his electric car, the Tesla, but that was a sports car. Rydell was after a different kind of driver: the le
gions driving around in Camrys, Impalas, and Accords. And so he’d recruited the best and the brightest designers and engineers, given them everything they needed to make it happen, and let them do their thing. It was just one of several pet projects he had running at the same time. He had teams working on more efficient wind farms, solar cells, and better wiring to ferry the resulting power around. Renewable energy and clean power were going to be the next great industrial revolution, and Larry Rydell was nothing if not visionary.
The only resource his projects fought over was his own time. Money certainly wasn’t an issue, even with the recent turmoil in the markets. He was well aware of the fact that he had more of it than he’d ever need. Every computer and cell phone user on the planet had contributed his or her share to his fortune, and the stratospheric share price his company had enjoyed had done the rest. And although Rydell enjoyed the good life, he’d found better things to do with his money than build himself five-hundred-foot yachts.
They’d had a long, productive day, overcoming a big hurdle they’d been trying to solve for weeks, and so he’d decided to reward the team by sending them off on their end-of-year break in style. He’d treated them to a great dinner, all the drink they could handle, and the best seats in the house. They’d just watched Paul Pierce slip past Kobe Bryant and slam home a two-handed dunk, and heard the first-period buzzer go, when the suspended cube of screens had flicked over to a live news feed and all noise had drained out of the arena.
As he stood there, mesmerized by the surreal display before him, he felt his BlackBerry vibrate in his pocket. The alert was one of three that never went comatose, even when his privacy settings were on, which was most of the time. One was entrusted to Mona, his PA—or, more accurately, the senior PA among the four who controlled the drawbridge to his office. Another was allocated to his ex-wife, Ashley, although she usually found it easier to call Mona and get him to call her back. The third, the one that was now clamoring for his attention, told him his nineteen-year-old daughter Rebecca was calling.
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