Just a rush, an excess of adrenaline. That’s all it was, but his nervous system was flirting with fight-or-flight. If he didn’t calm it down, he’d soon be having tunnel vision.
This happened sometimes after an AIT dream. Neurological panic, without a mental counterpart. Daniel didn’t imagine bad guys were about to burst into the hotel room, or that he was having a heart attack, or anything that would trigger such an adrenaline rush. Still, his heart pounded and the hair on his forearms stood up. His scalp tingled and perspiration poured from him. He felt hypothermic.
He stepped into the steaming shower without even trying to fumble out of his shorts and sat down in the tub, shivering under the hot spray.
Daniel marched up Lexington Avenue, keeping his speed up, giving the adrenaline somewhere to go. The rush had eased while he sat in the hot shower, stabilized as he dressed. But it needed some help to normalize. He could still taste cinnamon.
He wore dark sunglasses and his watch cap pulled down over his ears to dampen the sensory input. Still, the world was uncomfortably bright and loud and smelly, and he was too aware of the fabric of his clothes touching his skin.
It was not enough to be able to enter the vision on purpose—he also had to be able to not enter the vision when it came calling uninvited. With an assassin on his case in the real world, the timing might not always be convenient.
The timing wasn’t actually inconvenient now—he’d been safely ensconced in an upscale hotel, locked in his room, checked in under the name Colin Silvester. He needed to resist it now simply to learn how to resist it.
A skill that might save his life; the sooner acquired, the better.
So he would march up Lex at this pace, and if the rush decreased sufficiently, he would stop for dinner at the Grand Hyatt. Alcohol would help settle his nervous system, but he would limit himself to four drinks, over a couple of hours, with food. He would be careful not to overcompensate. He didn’t want to dampen the senses too much, just in case.
There was no reason to think Lucien Drapeau could’ve tracked him to New York. Daniel had traveled from Barbados as Colin Silvester on a passport not even the Foundation knew about. Only two other people knew of its existence—Yoshi Inoue, the forger who made it, and Pat Wahlquist, Daniel’s best friend.
Though extraordinarily slim, there was still a chance the assassin could be in New York by coincidence. In which case, he’d avoid any bars and hotels and restaurants he’d spent time in on his last visit. Hence, the Grand Hyatt. Drapeau had spent more time there than any other place in the file; it would be the last place in Manhattan he’d want to be, were he in town.
After leaving Carter Ames and checking into his hotel, Daniel had used his computer to send Pat a voice-mail. He had no doubt that Pat would reply with an invitation to visit, and he was betting the invitation would be in his voice-mail inbox when he returned to his room.
This surety allowed Daniel to take this walk, but he still felt twitchy as hell, his gait was too stiff, and he considered the possibility that perhaps he should’ve settled for jumping jacks and Hindu squats in his room. Crossing Thirty-Eighth Street, he guessed he’d have to walk a dozen blocks past the Hyatt, and back, before he could sit still. Then he realized the cinnamon taste was no longer waning, but was in fact getting stronger.
Oh. Shit.
A violent electric current ran through Daniel’s nervous system and his knees buckled, his stumble drawing contemptuous looks from a couple of passing businessmen.
And then she spoke. The woman from his visions, this archeologist from New England, her voice coming from everywhere at once, filling his head. “Daniel, pay attention. I can help you, but I need you to come back. You have to cross over.”
A new shudder rocked him—his shoulders and arms twitched and he wobbled slightly but didn’t stumble.
One of the men called out, “Go sleep it off, douchebag.”
Dana Cameron’s disembodied voice-of-god voice said, “Your life is in danger.”
“Jesus Christ,” Daniel cut in, “you think I don’t know that?” He had no reason to believe she could hear him—the voice in his head had never responded to his attempts at conversation before—but he knew he couldn’t contain himself, knew his mouth had to speak it. So he would act the part of an agitated man in the midst of a strange phone call.
As he lifted his phone to his ear, Dana Cameron’s voice said, “You need to cross over and find me here. Over a thousand lives will be lost. I’ve seen it.”
Will be.
“So this,” Daniel blurted, “this event you’ve been warning me about is in the future. When?”
Her voice again: “Just let go of where you are, and wake up here.”
The world lost its mooring. Lexington Avenue started revolving around Daniel, then sped up, and his last terrible thought before passing out was:
This is what it feels like to go right out of your gourd.
8
Sound returned first.
Tree frogs?
No.
Electronic.
Beeping.
For a while, sound was all—long enough for Daniel to identify it as the sound of a heart monitor. Then the antiseptic smell—hospital—followed by body awareness—lying in a hospital bed—and finally—at last—he became aware of light behind his eyelids, and he opened his eyes.
A man stood at the foot of Daniel’s bed. Daniel blinked him into focus. Average height, fighter’s physique, swarthy.
Raoul Aharon. Mossad, years ago, before joining the Foundation. He’d been Daniel’s handler, martial arts instructor, and chief ball-buster.
Raoul nodded. “Dorothy awakes.”
“Always fancied myself more of a Sleeping Beauty,” said Daniel.
Raoul stepped closer. “Enjoy the ride?”
Daniel said, “How long was I out?”
“Just over four hours since you collapsed in the street. Someone calls 9-1-1, ambulance brings you to Bellevue, no ID, your face goes into the system as a John Doe, and you pop up on our screens about twenty-three minutes after EMS picked you up. I’ve been standing watch ever since.”
Daniel found the button to raise his bed up to sitting, waited until the electric motor clicked off. “But I’m an outsider now, so why is my passing out in the street of interest to you?”
Raoul made his exasperation clear with his whole face, backing it up with a sound not unlike a growl. “I know you’re not coming back, Daniel, but when you do come back, I will take great joy, kicking your ass all over the mats. You’ll shed some blood for all the bullshit you’re putting us through. Sneaking up on Carter was not okay.”
Daniel smiled. “Sorry I made you look a fool in front of the boss. But I didn’t design his security, I just walked through the hole you guys left in it. So get over your own bad self.” He sat upright and turned, swinging his feet out of the bed, reached for the cart and shut off the damn beeping, then pulled the pulse finger-clamp thing off his finger. “I’m gonna check myself out. And when I leave, I’m leaving alone. So if you’re here for a reason, now’s the time.”
Raoul combed his fingers through his curly hair, blew out a long breath, holding back his first response. He said, “Doctor needs to speak with you before you leave, to be sure you haven’t suffered a mental breakdown. You were behaving erratically before you passed out. They’ve ruled out stroke and epilepsy, and aside from an insignificant amount of alcohol, they found no intoxicants in your system.”
Daniel said, “I can tell you what they found. They found a titanic dose of caffeine, elevated stress hormones, depleted adrenaline, and you know what else?” He eyed the IV line running from the back of his left hand up to the saline bag hanging above. “I’m dehydrated.” He looked back to Raoul. “I went from tropical heat to below freezing, no sleep for forty-six hours, mainlining coffee. I acted erratically because I was battling not to lose consciousness on Lexington Avenue. I was trying to push through it.”
Raoul nodded impati
ently. “Of course, that’s exactly what you’ll tell them, and they’ll believe you. But I know what really went down. I do. You had an episode. You’ve got AIT.”
“Are you high?” said Daniel.
Raoul continued as if Daniel hadn’t spoken. “I’m actually jealous. Seriously, I’d give my left nut to be one of the chosen. A conduit to God?” He shrugged. “Or the little grouchy guy pulling levers behind the curtain—whatever we choose to call whatever’s behind the veil.”
“Raoul. Stop. I don’t have AIT.”
Daniel held Raoul’s eye, counted seven Mississippis before Raoul said, “No shit?”
“No shit,” Daniel lied.
“Oh.” Raoul was quiet for a few seconds. “Then you better get ready, my friend, because you will.”
In the depths of his mind, Daniel had known it was coming for longer than he was comfortable admitting. From the sheer coincidence of being sent by the Vatican to debunk his own long-estranged uncle, to the physical impossibility of Tim speaking backward and predicting the future—each time Daniel had found himself facing a crack in reality, almost catching a glimpse of something beyond what we know, and each time it hit like vertigo, almost like the feeling of slipping into or out of an AIT vision.
There had been so many times with his uncle. And the soldier in West Virginia had known Daniel had been a priest. And all the impossible coincidences that had put Julia’s Air Force Intelligence file with Michael Dillman’s name in his hands . . . the impossibility of opening Kara’s journal—one of a hundred, selected at random—letting it fall open to a random page and finding the exact same phrase spoken by the AIT-stricken American soldier. Ignoring the impossibility of the phrase being in both places, Daniel was the only person on Earth who had heard the soldier speak those words—the only person who could’ve recognized them in Kara’s journal.
And then there was Angelica Ory in New Orleans. Tim had seen her in an AIT vision. Although they were strangers, he woke from the vision with her name and her French Quarter address in his head. When Daniel and Tim walked into her place, she took one look at Daniel and dropped her teacup. She had dreamed of Daniel, not Tim.
AIT had been repeatedly pointing its creepy finger at Daniel, and he’d chosen to ignore it. But looking deep into his sense of self, he knew it went back even further. Somehow, it had always been there, like the softest whisper of wind in his mind’s ear.
But AIT was no longer just pointing at Daniel. Now it had him by the throat, and he could no longer afford to ignore anything.
The question was: How did Raoul know Daniel was going to get AIT? But the answer to that question would come at the price of Daniel coming in from the cold. That was the carrot Raoul dangled, but to bite it Daniel would have to admit he had AIT, and he was damned if he’d serve the Foundation as a guinea pig.
He said, “It doesn’t run in families, you know that. My uncle having had AIT doesn’t increase my odds. Hell, maybe you’re gonna get it next, and you can keep both your nuts.”
“Daniel, you’re not hearing me. We don’t suspect you’re going to get AIT, we know it. It’s why we scouted you in the first place.” Raoul waved his hand around in a small circle. “You say you don’t have it, and I admit I can’t tell if you’re lying. We trained you too well. But if you’re not, then it just hasn’t hit you yet. Maybe this event was the first blip—the arrival may be imminent. But sooner or later, AIT is coming for you, and you don’t want to go through it alone. You’ll need our help.”
Daniel put his bare feet on the cold linoleum, pushed himself to standing, and found he was steady on his feet. He grabbed the IV stand by its pole and dragged it along with him as he shuffled across the room. “Thanks for stopping by, Raoul. If at some future date I start speaking in tongues and I want your help with that, I’ll be in touch. Meanwhile, I gotta piss like a racehorse.”
Raoul shook his head. “You don’t have to be quite so much of an asshole.”
“Apparently,” said Daniel, “I do have to be at least this much of an asshole. Do I need to have it tattooed on my forehead? Not. Coming. Back.” Daniel opened the door and gestured to the hallway.
“Right,” said Raoul as he left the room. “Good luck with that.”
9
It’s staggering,” said Anderson Cooper, looking up from the copy of The Truth (So Far) about Trinity that lay on the anchor desk to his right, “how much has changed in such a short time.” He swiveled to face Julia Rothman. “When you first appeared on the show, we were both convinced Tim Trinity’s predictions were fraudulent, that he was running some kind of con job on the world.”
Julia chuckled. “To be fair, Trinity was, by his own admission, a con man—he said so on national television. And he was predicting the future—something we still don’t understand—so extreme skepticism was reasonable. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof—I said at the time, we have to follow the evidence where it leads and resist the urge to get ahead of ourselves.”
“And you’ve been following the evidence ever since. What do we now know, for sure, that we didn’t then?”
“We know that what happened to Tim Trinity was a real phenomenon—scientists now studying it are using the term Anomalous Information Transfer. Trinity really did predict future events that were impossible to know ahead of time, with one hundred percent accuracy. And we know this AIT phenomenon is happening to other people.”
“But we still don’t know what AIT is, or where this anomalous information is coming from.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Tim Trinity thought God was speaking to him.”
Julia nodded. “He was completely convinced of it, thought the predictions were God’s way of drawing the world’s attention so he could deliver God’s message.”
“Which was basically, ‘Be nice to each other.’”
“Basically, yes. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. He called it ‘God’s only commandment.’ But that’s the central tenet of almost every religion you can name—it seems dubious to me that, after all these years, God would finally reveal himself just to say something that every religion already ascribes to him. Despite Trinity’s certainty, we don’t even know if there is a god, much less knowing that God is causing AIT.”
“In the book, you write about six cases of AIT, and you profile three in depth. None of them share Trinity’s belief.”
“Right. Of the three, one is an atheist, one is a Zen Buddhist who also doesn’t believe in a supreme being, and one is a lapsed Catholic who dabbles in voodoo and says he has no idea what to believe. All three are now working with university neurologists and psychologists and parapsychologists, and we’ll just have to stay tuned and see what further evidence they uncover. One thing’s for sure: We’re living in strange times.”
Cooper shook his head. “People are not reacting well to these strange times, to put it mildly. They’re angry. Look at these scenes, going on just today.”
The television screen filled with footage of demonstrations around the world, people with raised fists and bullhorns marching past parliaments and capitol buildings, gathering in public squares, in front of churches and mosques and temples.
Some carried signs proclaiming the arrival of the End Times or salvation—or both—but most carried signs of simple protest.
HOW MANY HAVE AIT?
STOP THE LIES
WHAT IS THE REAL NUMBER?
TELL US THE TRUTH
THE PUBLIC HAS A RIGHT TO KNOW
Over the protest footage, Cooper said, “Almost eighty thousand demonstrators in St. Peter’s Square, forty thousand in Washington, DC, twenty in Paris, over thirty in Berlin and Tokyo, twenty-five in Moscow . . . every major city around the globe, and growing fast. Authorities are expecting a massive protest at next month’s emergency G7 meeting in London.”
The screen cut back to the studio set. Cooper said, “These people believe there’s a conspiracy of silence. They think the people in power are not te
lling all they know about AIT, what it is and how far it has spread.”
Julia let out a wry grin. “In my experience, people in power rarely tell all they know, about anything. And not just people in power—most people don’t tell all they know. As a journalist, I have to accept that reality and get on with my job, keep digging. Several doctors studying AIT have estimated that there are perhaps a few thousand cases worldwide, but like everyone, my sources have their own agendas, and I suspect many more than a few thousand. I’m not trying to feed conspiracy theories, but I think people are angry for a reason. I don’t think we’re being told everything.”
“How many more cases do you suspect?”
“I just don’t know yet. That’s why my book is called The Truth (So Far).”
Cooper said, “Protest organizers are pointing to the worldwide spike in admissions to psychiatric hospitals and mental health clinics as evidence that AIT is far more widespread than authorities are admitting. At least two hundred thousand more psychiatric admissions than the same month last year, as estimated by the World Health Organization.”
“It’s true there is a spike,” conceded Julia, “but we can’t jump to the conclusion that these are cases of AIT. Some may be, but most are probably not. We’re living in a time of high anxiety on many fronts—Brexit, the bioterror attack in South Carolina, widening war in the Middle East, the election, the economy, increased droughts and the effects of climate change . . . many mental health professionals believe the cumulative weight of recent world events could easily explain the mental health crisis we’re seeing.”
Cooper said, “Protest leaders also point out that a disturbing number of these people are claiming the end of the world is imminent.”
The Savior's Game (The Daniel Byrne Trilogy Book 3) Page 5
