by Brian Nelson
Jane was rehearsing what she would say, how to express her mix of hope and fear, when she heard a woman laugh. It was an excited, happy sound.
“You must be kidding? You’re amazing,” the woman said.
Jane slowed her pace and listened.
She heard Ryan laugh. “No, it’s all true. I swear.”
“I would have been terrified.”
Now Jane was close enough to steal a glimpse into the office. Ryan was completely hidden from view, but she could see Olivia Rosario sitting on the edge of her seat near the door leaning forward in rapt attention, long legs emerging beneath a black skirt. Her face was hidden, but Jane could see her long black hair.
Rosario laughed again. “Tell me how you did it,” she said, “I mean, it sounds ingenious.” At that moment, she leaned back in her chair. Jane saw how her eyes were focused on Ryan, her smile eager and inviting. Then for a moment her face changed, like someone taking off a mask, and her eyes flitted away from him and out the open door. For a brief second she and Jane locked eyes. Then the woman opened her legs and—with a deft motion—swung the door closed with her foot.
Jane stared at the door for a moment in disbelief. That fucking bitch, she thought. She stepped up to the door and was about to fling it open when she stopped.
She had come here to talk to Ryan, her friend and confidant. But she was struck by a sudden fear that the Ryan Lee on the other side of this door was no longer the person she thought she knew. Somehow he had changed.
Dejected, she returned to the apartment block. At first she thought she’d go see Lili and Xiao-ping. They would understand what she was going through. But she reconsidered. Since Xiao-ping’s return from Africa they’d become like newlyweds, conjoined at the hip. Kissing and snuggling and holding hands. It was enough to give you cavities just watching them. Jane didn’t need to be around that kind of joy right now.
Just go home, she told herself. Get some sleep.
As she got off the elevator, she saw a form sitting against her door, a black hoodie covering most of her face.
“Mei?” Jane asked.
The girl flipped back the hoodie. It was Lili’s fourteen-year-old niece. “It’s about time!” the girl said in annoyance. “What took you so long?” Next to the girl were a couple of brown paper bags.
“What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you, obviously.”
Jane smiled. “What’s in the bags?”
“Duh, Chinese.” The girl stood and gave Jane a wry smile. Then she jumped into her arms. Jane held the girl’s embrace.
“Wait a minute, were you over at the Curtiss’s tonight? Visiting Logan?” A look of mock-horror erupted on Jane’s face. “Were you eavesdropping on the admiral?”
“I am not at liberty to discuss that.”
“What?”
“I cannot confirm or deny that allegation.”
“Girl, you have definitely been spending too much time over there.” She unlocked her apartment door. “Get inside.”
A half hour later, white takeout boxes were littered across the table, and they were laughing about Mei’s fortune cookie.
I don’t feel like giving you a fortune, go get another cookie.
“Sassy little cookie,” Jane said.
“Luckily there’s one more in the bag.”
“Oh, this is more like it: ‘To stay healthy, eat more Chinese food.’ ”
They laughed again.
As they were cleaning up, Jane finally asked. “So were you really at Curtiss’s today?”
“I told you that’s classified.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Yeah, I heard him. He spent most of the time I was there trying to help Eric. And when he wasn’t getting what he wanted, he got really pissed. I think it’s personal to him now.”
Jane nodded. “Thanks, that’s good to know.”
Mei came over and hugged her. “I miss him, too, you know.”
Against her wishes, Jane’s eyes began to water. During their escape from China, Eric and Mei had formed a tight bond. And in the aftermath—following Mei’s mother’s death and before Lili had come home—it was Eric and Jane who had taken care of Mei, the three of them living together, right here in this apartment.
“Can I spend the night tonight?” Mei asked. “Like old times?
“Of course,” Jane said. “I’d love that.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Kalahari
November 9, 2026
Namibia
As Eric touched Karuma’s hand he was struck by how coarse and hard it was, like chunks of pumice strung together. Karuma felt the contrast too and laughed. “Your hands are softer than a baby springbok. How they get that way?”
“By spending most of my life indoors working on a computer.”
Karuma made a sound of disgust. “What kind of life is that?”
Eric had to laugh. “That’s a very good question.”
Karuma led him around the camp, and Eric tried to open his remaining senses, to gather as much information from the world around him as he could. He was beginning to understand the stories about how blind people’s other senses became hyperacute. It was in part due to necessity, but also because the brain was rewiring itself. Sections of his occipital cortex were now being fed data from all over the brain, trying to make a “picture” of a world with just sound, taste, smell, and touch.
He realized how much information his brain received but didn’t use, largely because his eyesight made it redundant. The wind was one thing he had never noticed unless it was blowing hard. But now the touch of the air on his cheek was the first thing he noticed. Of all his senses, touch was the one that was most awake now. He felt the change of temperature on his skin when a cloud passed beneath the sun, and his skin told him if he was straying from the track by how compact the earth was under his bare feet.
His other senses were more alive too.
“There’s a sweet smell coming from over there.” He pointed.
“Yes,” Karuma said. “There is mango tree over there . . . about one hundred meters.”
“I also hear a sound like water, but it’s not water.”
“That is the wind in the grass.”
“The locusts are in the grass then? I hear them droning in the afternoon when it gets hot.”
“Yes, very good,” Karuma laughed. “See, you are not so blind after all.”
“Let me try and take it from here. After all, you don’t want to have to do this in the middle of the night.”
“As you wish.” He could almost feel Karuma’s smile.
By now Eric had picked up the smell of the latrine and he could feel the compacted earth under his feet.
He felt a strong sense of accomplishment when he reached the door. He opened it and stepped inside only to be instantly assailed by a hail of blows and curses.
He had forgotten to knock. The woman screamed and kicked and scratched at him. He bent low and protected his head, stumbling back outside.
It only took a second for what seemed like the whole village to gather around them, laughing hysterically. Finally, the old woman stormed off.
“Are you all right?” It was Khamko’s voice, but Eric could feel the grin on his face.
“I’m fine. Please tell her that I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I told her that you didn’t see a thing.”
Over the next five days Karuma became his constant companion. He was outside Eric’s hut first thing in the morning and helped him get into bed each night. Perhaps it was his fascination with Eric’s world, or his desire to learn more English, or a way to rebel against his mother, but the young man stayed loyally by his side, playing the roles of protector, mentor, and student.
He was insatiably inquisitive and wanted to know everything a
bout America. His favorite subject was snow. To the young man it sounded like magic. How it could bury a whole town, how you could make tunnels through it, and how you could put sticks on your feet and zoom down a hill on it. He made Eric tell half the village the story of a blizzard that had buried Bloomington in six feet of snow when he was a kid.
He would also ask many questions that showed how different their world was. “When you get a headache in America, what plant do you eat to feel better?”
But most of their time was spent learning words. Karuma insisted that Eric teach him thirty words a day. Since Eric had only time to kill he took up the challenge, and the two made a pact to teach other at the same time. They would pick their daily words each morning and all day long they would repeat them over and over until their pronunciation was right. Karuma was both an excellent student and teacher. His first task was to teach Eric the four clicking sounds—//, /, #, and !.They ranged from a sound like a cork popping [!] that was made using your whole tongue, to the more wet, soft click [//] that used the cheeks. All the children sat around laughing as Eric attempted to click properly. At times he grew frustrated—here was an MIT and Stanford grad unable to pronounce a single consonant—but their laughter forced him to be a good sport about it.
Eric’s most useful phrase was “Tari nee?” What’s this? When he heard something he didn’t understand, he put his hand to his ear and would say Tari nee? If he smelled something he didn’t recognize, he’d touch his nose and do the same.
He learned to count: /gui (one), /gam (two), !nona (three). And he learned the names of the sun and the moon (sore-s and //khã-b). He learned the name for fire (/ae-b), meat (//gan-i), sand (//khae-b), and ostrich (|gáro).
When they weren’t practicing words, they were eating. This, strangely, had become Eric’s favorite thing to do. Perhaps it was the blindness (his sense of taste trying to make up for the sense he had lost) but he looked forward to food like never before. Much of it was strange to him, and not being able to see it might have been a blessing. But most of it was delicious. He could never remember eating such an incredible variety of foods. Tubers, roots, berries, leaves, melons. One of their staples was the fruit from the baobab tree, which was the size of small cantaloupe. The chalky part around the seed was mixed with water to form a tangy citrus porridge. He ate all types of game—springbok, gemsbok, porcupine, and hyrax (a mammal about the size of guinea pig). He ate many different types of birds, sometimes bones and all. Yes, there were a few meals where he was squeamish and didn’t eat much, but his mounting hunger soon overcame his food snobbery. But the day he tried his first wild honey was a day he would never forget. Before he even tasted it, he was in love. Its aroma was heavenly, a dense woody sweetness. Khamko handed him a dripping chunk of honeycomb the size of his fist. “A special treat today,” he said. One taste and he was addicted. It seemed to go straight to his brain like a powerful drug. It wasn’t hard to understand why. Wild honeycomb was likely the most energy-packed natural food on the planet—not just for the sugars but for the protein too. All the bee larvae were still inside, and he could even feel a few squirming against his gums. He didn’t care. Never had any food made him so happy. He kept the wad of wax in his mouth for an hour, chewing and sucking on it.
Almost as soon as he was done, he began to fantasize about eating more. Over the next few days he kept pestering Khamko. The old man only laughed. “Better than cherry Coke, isn’t it?”
It was on his sixth day in the camp that Eric sensed something was up. It was mostly a feeling, but it seemed that everyone was busy, moving with an urgency that he hadn’t felt before.
He touched Karuma’s arm, pointed to his ear, “Tari nee?”
“I think we are leaving.”
“Leaving?”
“Yes. People are packing their things.”
At just that moment he heard Khamko’s voice. He put a hand on Eric’s arm. “Gǃkau and his hunting party have just returned, and I think it will be best if we go.”
“Why?”
“I had thought that the Chinese had stopped looking for you, but Gǃkau saw them yesterday, about twenty-five kilometers from here.”
Eric felt a jolt of fear at the thought of the Chinese being so close; the memories of his captivity rushing back to him.
He tried to think logically: He didn’t know why Captain Everett had been unable to rescue him, but he suspected that it was a political decision, stemming from the fallout from the raid on the mining camp. That meant that without Khamko and his people, Eric would have already fallen into enemy hands.
That brought a deep sense of gratitude. But it came with a sense of guilt. From what he understood, these people still hunted with bows and spears. And by harboring him, they had pitted themselves against a military might they couldn’t even fathom. He thought of the massacre he’d seen in the mining camp when the gunships had arrived, the Black Widows raining metal fire from the sky.
“Khamko, I can’t ask you to protect me anymore. It’s not right.”
“Not right? You are a blind man lost in a place you don’t know or understand. Of course it is right.”
“But you and your people are taking a terrible risk. I don’t think you understand that.”
“I know you want to go home. But right now, the only path toward civilization would be toward the Chinese. So for the time being we have to go further into the bush.”
“You are risking too much for me,” he said.
He felt the man’s hand on his shoulder. “Cgang sent you to us for a reason. I do not know why, but I know it will become clear. Besides, we have been hiding from the Chinese for years.” Then he whispered in Eric’s ear, “They are very bad trackers.”
Eric shook his head. “But you shouldn’t be leaving your village because of me.”
Khamko laughed a long, full laugh, that reminded Eric of singing. “This isn’t our village,” he said.
“What?”
“This is an ugly old settlement made by the government in the ’90s, when they were trying to force us to become herders and ranchers. There is a well here, so we come from time to time to get water. After we found you, I chose this spot for you to rest.”
Again he felt grateful . . . and guilty. This whole time they had been waiting around for him to get better.
“Didn’t you know?” Khamko said, “We are Sān. The Kalahari is our home. And now you will learn how we really live.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Old Bones
November 11, 2026
Washington, DC
General Chip Walden sat in his office in the Pentagon looking out at the rolling hills of Arlington National Cemetery: acre after acre of white rectangular grave markers broken only by an occasional tree or larger memorial. The undulating white rows reminded him of snow on summer grass. An odd contrast, he knew, but fitting for the place, which at first glance appeared to be a pristine park but held the sleeping bones of tens of thousands of dead.
When he first began working at the Pentagon he had often walked down its lanes, thinking that it would be a peaceful refuge from the frenetic chaos of the nation’s capital. But he never found peace there, and at times would find himself sad and confused or even weeping for no apparent reason. Although he was not a superstitious man, he had been forced to conclude that the place was haunted, that something tragic and melancholy was seeping up from the ground and poisoning the air.
He turned from the window and looked back at his desk.
His plan to take control of the Naval Research Lab was going well. Establishing Olivia Rosario in the AI department was just the first step. The next step was to get rid of Jim Curtiss, because it was Curtiss (and his allies like CNO Garrett) that stood between him and the technology he needed to get the man he really wanted: the Inventor. The man who had murdered Julia.
Walden’s jaw tightened as he remembered h
ow Curtiss and Garrett had hid the truth from him.
It was one thing to believe that your wife had died in a car accident. It was something he could accept because we all live our lives knowing that random chance can end it all. That’s just the way life is. It was just an accident, like the tens of thousands of accidents that claim lives every day.
But to know that there was a man out there who had murdered her . . . so capriciously, so needlessly. That touched something deep, deep inside him. It was not exactly a seed, for it had sprung to life full grown the moment he learned the truth. But the result was the same: there was something living inside him, gnawing at him, and it would not wilt or die until justice was done.
She had been the only woman he truly loved. Yes, they were separated, but she was going to take him back, he was sure of it. He had been doing everything right. All the little things that she had criticized . . . and the big things too. She had even said that she forgave him, she just needed a little more time.
But it was, to put it mildly, complicated. He was a good father and husband . . . 95 percent of the time. It wasn’t easy being a high-ranking officer, especially when he was away on deployments. He’d messed up a few times, and she’d found out about one of those times.
I forgive you, but I just need more time.
He’d held on to those words and tried to support her sudden need for freedom. First Italy. Then Greece. Then China. And even when he’d discovered that she had not been alone in the car, he had dismissed it. He believed her; she was coming back to him.
Her picture still sat on his desk. He looked at her beautiful face then rubbed the back of his neck. One thing at a time, he told himself. I will get my revenge, but first I have to get Curtiss out of my way.
But that was going to be much harder than he had originally thought. After the Namibia raid—with four airmen KIA and a top scientist MIA—Curtiss was weak, like a fighter on the ropes, but he was still too strong to knock out. Walden hated to admit it, but Curtiss had just been too successful for too long. What’s more, he was too well-connected to be discharged for one botched raid. No, if Walden was going to knock Curtiss out, he needed something bigger.
