The Rift

by Bob Mayer

  Moms waited, ready to be schooled, because no matter how high up you went, someone was always there above you, and every once in a while you got called in.

  She wondered who schooled Hannah.

  “As you know, there is evil in the world,” Hannah said. “You focus on the abnormal evil. Rifts, Fireflies, and the sort. And other problems. Rogue scientists. Stupid scientists. Nature gone amok. But there is a much more insidious evil. The worst kind. The one that hides inside men’s souls. In the dark corners of their hearts. The latent evil, the truly dangerous inside of people, which the psychopaths can tap into. And that evil can spread rapidly among those who are not necessarily evil to begin with. I learned this the hard way as a young woman, being drawn into something terrible because I loved someone. Sometimes love can be turned, twisted.”

  Hannah smiled at Moms’s expression. “Don’t look so shocked. We all had lives before we were sucked into this dark world we inhabit. I know that sounds simplistic, but if you look at some of the more dramatic examples in the past hundred years and then factor in the speed with which we can interact with each other now via digital means, the world has become a much more frightening place. Where evil people can spread their message much more effectively and quickly.

  “We’ve had Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hussein, bin Laden, and others. When will the next version of those arise? Where? And how much more effective will they be with access to the Internet? I believe legends and dogma exist for a reason. The concept of an anti-Christ has its roots in a base fear we all have.”

  Hannah tapped her desk once more. “The person who sits here has the power of life and death. Judge, jury, and then send the executioner on a Sanction. How different does that make me from those evil people?”

  “Your motivation for what you do,” Moms said. “You’re protecting people from the evil.”

  “Perhaps. I sometimes think,” Hannah said, “that if the Cellar had existed before World War Two, it might have been able to stop some of the carnage. Most likely not the war itself, but some of the horror perpetuated under the cover of the war.”

  “Can you separate the two?” Moms asked.

  Hannah sighed. “I certainly hope so.”

  “You think the Cellar would have taken out Hitler?”

  Hannah shrugged. “Perhaps. But we didn’t take out Hussein. So who knows?”

  “War has never been clean,” Moms said. “I’ve seen it firsthand. I watched a sniper in Baghdad one time. A simple thing. Most Iraqis can’t swim, but they were fleeing us, trying to cross the Tigris. So there was a group. Five. Grabbed on to a large beach ball and were using it as a float to get across the river. A man, two women, and two children.

  “And the sniper. He shot the ball, laughing as he did so. A ‘good’ American boy. From Nebraska or Idaho or one of those wholesome states. He watched those people drown. He put down his rifle and took pictures.”

  “And what did you do?” Hannah asked.

  “I almost shot him.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “Because you are not evil. Was he?” Hannah asked.

  “He was caught up in it. You do become inured to it. Callous.”

  Hannah leaned forward. “Does that scab you cover yourself with grow thicker or thinner with time?”

  Moms shrugged. “Depends on the person, I guess. Is that why you’re asking me about love?” Moms challenged. “I don’t want your job, by the way.”

  “I plan on having my job for quite a while,” Hannah said.

  “I don’t want Ms. Jones’s job either.”

  “No one really cares what you want or don’t want,” Hannah said. She pulled open a drawer. She reached in and took out an object, which she placed on the desk, in clear view of Moms, whose legs quickly became uncrossed and hands became fists.

  “Where did you get that?” Moms demanded.

  It was a picture album, the kind you buy at Walgreens or K-Mart or more likely remaindered at the Dollar Store. Which is exactly where Moms’s mother had gotten it with her employee discount as a young teenager. It was obviously cheap, covered in fake imitation leather. Gold letters on the front read OUR WEDDING.

  It was anything but a wedding album.

  “Dr. Golden tracked it down,” Hannah said.

  Moms absorbed the implications of that, which raised more questions than one sentence should. She tried to prioritize the questions in her mind, but Hannah didn’t give her the time.

  “Yes, Dr. Golden was researching your background. Digging deeper than the ones who vetted your security clearance. After all, there is a large difference between being trustworthy with secrets and being trustworthy. Don’t you think.”

  It was not a question, but a reminder.

  Hannah continued. “Dr. Golden found it in an old storage unit one of your brothers had forgotten about with the rest of the stuff from your now-abandoned childhood home. Covered in dust and neglect. Which raises an interesting point: Do your brothers love you? Did they love you when you took care of them when your mother was incapable of action most of the time due to her intoxication?” She didn’t consult any notes. “You have not spoken to any of your siblings for over six years.”

  “We don’t have siblings or family in the Nightstalkers,” Moms said. “I don’t believe you have them in the Cellar either.”

  Hannah ignored that. “Who loves you, Moms?” She reached out and placed a hand on the album. “Your mother cut pictures from catalogues and pasted them in here while she was a teenager. A wish list for her life.”

  Moms remembered the images her mother would stick on the old beat-up refrigerator, using magnets from the local feed lot to hold them in place. The album was the predecessor to the fridge.

  It wasn’t a step up.

  “A wish list,” Hannah continued, “that was ironically canceled by the wedding in front of the judge with no flowers or rings or anything in this book. A wedding you were present for, although certainly you can’t be expected to remember it. It’s why you see weddings, indeed all intimate relationships, as the end, not the beginning.”

  “Is that shrink-speak? I thought I got that later with Dr. Golden?”

  Hannah ignored her. “Then the pictures change. From the perfect wedding to places. Beautiful places all around the world from old National Geographic magazines.” Hannah flipped it open. “You had this up until eight years ago; then you gave it to your brother.”

  “That’s private,” Moms said. There was an edge to her voice and she was leaning forward in the chair.

  “Of course,” Hannah said. She looked up from the album and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “And, of course, you understand that’s almost the definition of irony saying that here, three hundred feet below the NSA? I can order you to go out and kill someone but you’re upset about a book that’s been gathering dust for years?”

  “It’s personal.”

  “And your life isn’t?” Hannah didn’t wait for an answer. “You used to check off these places, if you happened to have traveled to or through them and write notes to your mother about them. Postcards from the edge, literally, given some of your missions and assignments. Of course, you rarely traveled to the nice, exotic locales your mother dreamed of. Mostly hellholes, but there were some decent stops en route and on the way back.”

  “She loved me,” Moms said, trying to stop Hannah.

  “Not enough to stop drinking,” Hannah said. “Not enough to be a mother.”

  Moms pointed at the book. “She gave me hope. She gave me purpose.”

  “Rearing your brothers? Then traveling around the world killing people? It’s amazing what we get used to. For you, your life is sort of normal. Yet for a normal person your life is so far off the grid, they wouldn’t be able to comprehend it.”

  Moms wasn’t giving in so easily. �
��She at least showed me a world beyond what we had growing up. A world she knew she’d never see but I could. Even if it means killing people,” she added bitterly.

  “A world beyond that gray, flat Kansas horizon?” Hannah flipped the album shut. “Of more interest, and more importance, is who loved her? That’s where your allotment comes from.”

  Moms sat back, some of the anger draining from her. “You know.”

  “That’s what makes Mrs. Sanchez’s job so difficult and so important,” Hannah said. “Money leaves a trail. Many a Predator strike has resulted from following a money trail and Mrs. Sanchez is very good at that. She’s been responsible for quite a few strikes.

  “The allotment is from a man who loved your mother. Before you were born. He wanted to marry her but instead she married your father. Not planned for in the album of her future life. It is a testament to your mother’s beliefs that you are here at all. But part of that was marrying that man. The man who put her in a very small world and kept her there.

  “So the man who really loved your mother left. He went into the military. He couldn’t bear to stay in that town and see your mother still working at the Dollar Store, when she was able to make it to the job. It pained him to see her at all, so he left, and he eventually died in the service of our country. And he left the money to your mother so maybe she could see some of these places, but when he died, she was long since gone also, so it went to you.”

  Hannah fell silent.

  “Who was it?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Hannah swept the album off her desk and into the drawer and slid it shut.

  “That’s mine.”

  Hannah ignored her. She put her hands flat on the desk, and her dark eyes met Mom’s. “Who loved you? Loving someone, like you did your brothers and your mother and like you do your team, just gets you by. Most people go through life throwing love around to those they find worthy of it, but the real power is in who loves us. Because those who love us, they own a piece of us. They find us worthy.”

  Moms was confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Love is like electricity,” Hannah said. “When we feel it for someone, it’s grounded in our hopes and dreams. When someone loves us, it’s wild and free. Unleashed. It’s power without a ground. It can hurt us or help us. We have to decide which. The problem for you is that you didn’t have a you.”

  “I imagine there’s a point to all this,” Moms said.

  “I—” Hannah began, but then her desk phone trilled.

  Hannah picked it up. She listened and Moms watched her face, searching for any tell.

  There was none.

  “Bring her to me once she’s been cleared,” Hannah said. “Where is the terminus of the Loop message?”

  She listened and then issued a last order before hanging up. “Help the last relayer decrypt and send, then secure the Loop.”

  Hannah hung the phone up. “It appears things are not as we would like. Neeley was not able to Sanction Burns.”

  Moms stood. “My team—”

  Hannah held up a hand. “I believe a message is being forwarded to one of your team members as we speak.”

  “Where’s the demon core?” Ivar asked Doc as he slid shut the second drawer.

  Doc looked up from the cabinet he’d been rifling through. “Ah, the dragon’s tail. The very first Rift.”

  “The records are incomplete,” Ivar said.

  “Of course they are,” Doc said. “Everyone who worked on it disappeared.”

  Ivar shook his head. “No. I mean even the paperwork before they opened the Rift is wrong. Like they were hiding something.”

  “They were Nazis and—” Doc paused, searching for the right word—“you know, there was never a word for those who followed the emperor of Japan into that war. Who perpetuated crimes as bad as the Nazis. Nanking. The Bataan Death March. Unit 731.”

  “Japanese,” Ivar said.

  “Yes, but we make such a distinction between Nazis and Germans sometimes. Was every German a Nazi? Was every Japanese responsible for those crimes?”

  “The records,” Ivar said, thumping the drawer. “There’s very little on what this group, Odessa, was doing. The theoretical physicists.”

  “Ah, yes,” Doc said. “Odessa. Does the name ring a bell?”

  Ivar shrugged. “Not particularly.”

  “Ask Eagle about it sometime,” Doc said.

  Ivar tapped the drawer, getting back on track. “There’s some mention of the demon core.”

  “From Los Alamos,” Doc said. “Majestic-12 appropriated the plutonium core from Los Alamos that killed Daghlian and Slotin. They nicknamed it the demon core because of those accidents.”

  Every physicist knew of Daghlian and Slotin. Cautionary tales told early in their studies. “What was that thing about the dragon’s tail?” Ivar asked.

  “Enrico Fermi told Slotin that playing with that core was like tickling the dragon’s tail and that the dragon was going to consume him. More like it farted when Slotin’s screwdriver slipped, but it was a radioactive fart and it killed him.”

  “Where’s the demon core now?” Ivar asked. He looked about the Archives. “In some big lead box?”

  “They never found it after the first Rift,” Doc said. “It was assumed that the Odessa group used it to open the Rift and it got sucked through with them.”

  Ivar frowned. “But how come everyone who has opened a Rift since then hasn’t needed a plutonium core? Just algorithms?”

  “Good question, isn’t it?” Doc said.

  “But plutonium has a half-life of a little over twenty-four thousand years,” Ivar said. “Wherever it is, that core is still putting out a lot of radioactivity and potential power.”

  “Let’s hope it’s frying whoever is on the other side of the Rifts,” Doc said, and then pointedly went back to looking at the file he’d just pulled out.

  Wallace Cranston was standing at the craps table in the Bellagio losing his stash, his savings, and his shirt. He was thinking about going to the ATM to get the money he swore he wouldn’t get.

  His wife’s money.

  Even though doing that would most likely change that status to ex-wife. But he could feel it in his bones that his losing streak was just about up and he was going to hit it good.

  Of course, he didn’t even know what day it was, never mind what time it was, but he was on vacation and breathing the lovely oxygenated air they pumped in, and he was on the fourth, or fifth, or sixth day of a fantastic bender, and he felt anything was possible.

  He noticed the cleavage on the waitress as she handed him another rum and Coke, and he thought, Maybe even that’s possible, even though she had the dead eyes of one of Stephen King’s bad people from The Stand. Which reminded him he’d been to Boulder, Colorado, where the supposed good people had made their “stand,” and the locals there had been a bunch of liberal, stuck-up pricks, so he’d rather be here with the bad.

  “It’s Vegas, baby,” he whispered to himself, then took a slug of his drink and started to weave his way toward the ATM. He bounced into it, then used one hand to claim it as an anchor as he pulled his wallet out. He fumbled through it for the cash card he’d swiped before leaving home, hoping his wife hadn’t canceled it already.

  Then the phone that never went on vacation started to vibrate in his shirt pocket and chime with “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” which was more than appropriate here in Vegas. Cranston had a theory that people went to Vegas to die and to L.A. to suffer. He glanced back at the waitress with the dead eyes and thought, You’d like me better if you knew who I was.

  Then again, maybe not.

  He pulled the phone out and with surprisingly steady hands accepted the incoming text message. He saw the five letter groupings and knew he’d have to go back to his room to decrypt and forward.

  He lo
oked at the ATM and sighed. His wife would never know how close it came. Saved by the bell. By the ringtone. He started to giggle as he walked toward the elevator.

  He loved his job.

  And that was when the Men in Black appeared, seemingly out of the walls, one on either side, lifting him up off the ground, his feet still churning, searching for floor. They hustled him into the elevator. A third one, they all looked alike, took the phone and glanced at the screen.

  “Do you have the decryptor?”

  Cranston nodded. “In my room. I was gonna do it.”

  “We’ll help. It’ll save time. You don’t want to get this wrong.”

  Nada and Zoey were looking at the babies.

  They weren’t supposed to be in the nursery. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY the placard on the outside door read, like that had ever stopped Nada from going anywhere. In fact, it was practically an invitation.

  Nada checked his watch. They had three minutes before the nurse came by again. The staff had a rigid schedule, the bane of all security. They even had a little infrared thing they had to scan on a light on the wall to confirm they were doing their checks on time; someone thought the trinket added to the security of the place, when in reality it made the hospital all that much more vulnerable to those in the know. Nada knew he could have snatched every one of these little beasts, thrown them into a duffel bag, and been on the road before anyone noticed.

  But that would be wrong. Probably even to think it was wrong.

  “Hurry,” Nada said in a voice that said do anything but hurry to Zoey. He’d learned that was the best way to couch things with his niece. She still hadn’t quite forgiven him for the park incident and being abandoned to the police. She was stopping at each basinet and whispering baby talk and all sorts of gooey-gooey. A part of Nada suspected it was an act, designed to irritate him, so he feigned not being irritated.