Landfall

by John McWilliams

  “What if it becomes necessary to fly to Iceland?” Lauren asked.

  “Iceland? Fly to Timbuktu, for all I care! Just get me some answers—and don’t you bring that superbug back to me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now I have to try to figure out what to tell the director. Anything else?”

  “No, sir.”

  Arthur gazed at Lauren a moment. “Be careful, Lauren.” Then his apparition vanished.

  “What a dork,” Ellis muttered.

  Lauren picked up the index card and stared at it. “You think someone believes they can contact Dr. Lee through his crystal?”

  “For the winning lottery number?” Ellis asked.

  “Or maybe something a whole lot more dangerous.”

  Chapter 10

  “My only question is: Where’s the money?”

  Cooper “Coop” Dixon slaps Jan on the shoulder and laughs.

  Clayton had driven Nate, Jan, and Mary down to the main road, where Cooper Dixon was waiting with his immaculate black and orange Kenworth. Coop, himself, was another story. He was stocky, sleeveless, and reeked of cigarettes.

  “Four thousand, as promised.” Jan hands Coop a stack of bills as they walk around the front of the truck. “You get another four when you get us there—in less than twenty hours. Can you do that?”

  “Not a problem.” Coop licks a finger as he counts the bills.

  “Well, thanks for the hospitality,” Nate tells Clayton. He shakes the man’s hand and then turns to Mary, who throws her arms around him—as if he were her beau and heading off to war. “Okay…” Nate steps back, managing to peel her off him. “And no more picking up strangers.”

  “I won’t.”

  Jan hands Clayton another stack of bills. “I’ve got just one more favor to ask. When the FBI come calling—and they will any minute now—tell them you overheard us talking about going to Shanghai via Mexico City.” Jan glances at Nate. “That ought to pique their interest.” He turns back to Clayton. “And tell them that a silver sedan came and picked us up.”

  Aboard the truck, Jan and Nate discover that the sleeper cab is a veritable modern studio apartment. They toss their duffel bags onto the plush couch in the back, and Coop turns the passenger seat around so they can face each other across a table.

  “Nice, huh?” Coop grins. “And there’s playing cards, and beer and snacks in the fridge. Help yourselves.”

  Coop sinks into the driver’s seat and shifts into gear. Nate and Jan give a friendly wave to the two on the side of the road as Coop blasts the horn and the Kenworth starts to roll.

  “We’ll take 287 to 40, cutting through Wichita Falls,” Coop says. “That should get us there in sixteen, maybe seventeen hours.”

  “We’ll need to make a stop at some point,” Jan says. “We need to contact the person we’re meeting.”

  “Why do we have to stop for that?” Coop asks.

  “We need an internet connection. Any place that offers free Wi-fi will do.”

  “But you’ve got that right here,” Coop boasts. “A wireless network’s built right in. It’s called BigKenny and the guest password’s ‘BigKennyGuest’—all one word. Make yourselves at home. If you need anything, just give me a poke.” Coop puts on his headphones.

  “How about a beer?” Nate opens the refrigerator and hands Jan a Budweiser.

  Jan sets up the laptop and checks the major news sites for anything related to NASA’s or Roscosmos’s launches.

  Nate sits across from him, digging a piece of paper out of his front pocket.

  “What’s that?” Jan asks.

  “I don’t know.” Nate unfolds the paper, then chuckles. “It’s Mary’s email address.”

  “Seriously? You’re like a bug zapper—for women.”

  “Well, this one’s a little too young to get zapped.” Nate crumples up the paper. “Of course, by the time I get out of prison…”

  Jan points at the trash receptacle.

  “The sacrifices I make.” Nate tosses the note and moves to the couch at the back of the cab.

  “Anyway, there’s no news about the launches and nothing from Dimitry.” Jan opens his beer. “Oren, however, says that he’s on schedule, and asks if we remember his experiments with quick rendezvous launch profiles. Says he’s already working on some ideas.”

  “Brilliant minds.” Nate hoists his beer.

  Jan replies to Oren, telling him that they like the quick rendezvous idea and giving him their ETA. Then he moves over to Nate’s side of the table and turns the seat toward Nate.

  “So,” Jan says, “let’s assume for a moment that Oren has the launch covered and that we can both go. What do we do once we get up there?”

  “Whether it’s six hours or forty-eight,” Nate says, “they’re going to know we’re coming, and they simply don’t have to let us dock. Besides, even if they handed us the AWX, there’s still no way to secret it back to Earth.”

  “So, you’re back to Plan B?” Jan asks.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No, but, okay, how do we pull off Plan B?”

  “Well, we certainly can’t ram the space station—that’d involve complex orbital maneuvering and we’d most certainly miss. But what about an EVA, where we mount some kind of explosive device to the side of the Leonardo module? We’d have to get Dimitry to put the crystal and the hard drives back inside, of course—and we’d have to warn everyone. Who knows, though, we might even be able to convince them to set the Leonardo adrift.”

  “That could work,” Jan says, though he’s still not thrilled with Plan B. The destruction of the crystal and the Message’s content, which Dimitry has so carefully backed up onto those hard drives, would mean his task would be impossible to carry out. He needs that information from the future.

  “And, maybe this doesn’t have to be a suicide mission.” Nate sits up. “If I go up alone, then you’re free to flee the country and go underground. I’ll be the one they find in the capsule when it returns. Sure, I’ll get arrested. But with JLA’s legal team and what I could reveal about a certain midair cover-up—not to mention NASA’s involvement in a secret space race…”

  “So the experiment gets destroyed, I’m out of the country, and you’re just a thorn in the government’s side. That’s actually not a bad plan.”

  “I know.”

  “Of course the Message and its contents get destroyed as well—and the task is sacrificed.”

  “True, but even if I was able to retrieve the hard drives intact, would you really want to chance the FBI getting their hands on them when I return? It is Plan B, after all.”

  “I know,” Jan says. “It’s a good fallback. But we’d need explosives. The explosives we use at JLA are all integrated. You can’t exactly use a hatch door to blow up the Leonardo.”

  Nate nods.

  “Maybe Oren’ll have an idea.”

  “Maybe…” Nate gets up from the couch and taps Coop on the shoulder.

  Coop drops his headphones around his neck.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where we could get our hands on some explosives, would you?”

  “Explosives?” Coop squints. “You mean like Composition C? C4, that sorta thing?”

  “Precisely that sorta thing,” Nate says.

  “Can it wait until we get to Albuquerque?”

  “Yes, it can.”

  Chapter 11

  Lauren and Ellis left Los Alamos early the next morning for Houston. It was another slow, low-altitude flight, like the hop down from Edmonton. For Lauren, these flights really took the “hyper” out of hyperjet.

  She looked out at the gray-blue, five A.M. sky, and down at the darkened planet below. Then she waved her hand over the window, causing it to transform into an opaque, luminous panel.

  “Let’s think about this from the beginning.” Lauren placed her tablet on the table between her and Ellis. When the inductive power source light came on, she opened a holographic window.

  “How
about some coffee?” Ellis asked, yawning.

  “Sure.”

  Ellis went to the back of the G10-X’s cabin and returned with a Thermos and two cups.

  Under the FBI’s contract with AFCS (American Flight Command Services), this plane had remote pilots on standby 24/7. It was to be prepped with food and drinks—AFCS’s Ultimate Business Package—when given at least two hours’ notice from any major U.S. airport.

  “I did more research on Jan Lee last night,” Lauren said, referencing her notes. “Apparently he was this whiz kid who started a bunch of tech companies before purchasing the failing Orbital Systems Transport Corporation—which he renamed JL Aerospace. In less than three years, he turned it around and made it into NASA’s primary low-Earth-orbit transport vendor.

  “He also purchased another company called UK Crystal Optics—for helping with the development of his AWX crystals. Then he made three trips to the International Space Station—all before his thirty-first birthday.”

  Ellis dumped a handful of creamer and sugar packets onto the table.

  “Thanks.” Lauren poured coffee into the two cups, adding four packets of sugar and two creamers to her own. “So, he designed this ‘micro-laboratory’—a kind of all-in-one crystal growth and testing apparatus. Like a miniature factory. It went up first, and that cosmonaut Dr. Watson told us about, Dimitry Antonov, he put it together. Dimitry Antonov worked for Lee through an agreement with the Russian space agency.” Lauren sipped her coffee.

  Ellis stared out his window.

  “Now this is interesting,” she said, pointing at an article. “Dr. Lee was involved in a high-intensity physical fitness program, working with NASA’s medical team. He also started developing martial arts techniques for use in near zero-G—just for fun.”

  Ellis waved away his window.

  “Interesting, right?”

  “Sure, but all this stuff just makes it seem even stranger that he killed himself.”

  “I agree.”

  “I mean, I still think he’s dead,” Ellis clarified.

  “Maybe, but I’m really starting to doubt it was suicide,” Lauren said. “Remember those two buildings at that NASA complex in White Sands that were also bombed?” She flipped back a couple of pages. “Turns out the C4 used on the space station and the C4 used on those buildings were chemically identical. And besides, Jan Lee just doesn’t seem like the type.”

  “Jan Lee? What happened to Dr. Lee?” Ellis raised an eyebrow.

  “Look, check this out.” She turned the tablet so they both could see. “This is an old YouTube video—part of a series of videos taken at JLA’s sports complex.”

  The video began with Jan Lee, in all black, bowing to a dozen or so children seated at the edge of some mats.

  “He’s in awesome shape, don’t you think?” Lauren glanced at Ellis.

  “What’s he saying? Can you turn it up?”

  “Be of two minds,” Jan Lee was telling the kids. “Remember, no matter how hard you train, there will always be opponents who can beat you. That is always a fact. Even the greatest fighter in the world can always be beaten. I know that doesn’t seem to make sense, but it’s true. No one is the greatest fighter in the world every moment of their lives.”

  “The fighter could get sick,” a little girl said.

  “That’s right,” Jan Lee told her. “What’s the greatest fighter in the world with the flu? Certainly not the greatest fighter in the world. Not that day. On that day, millions of people could kick his butt.”

  The kids laughed.

  “So don’t think of your training as some kind of shield against never getting your butt kicked. Think of it as a training ground for dealing with getting your butt kicked. And I don’t mean just in the literal sense. I mean in all the way’s one can be beaten—you fail your chemistry test; a girlfriend or boyfriend breaks up with you; your goldfish, Mr. Flippers, dies.”

  The kids giggled.

  “Life is full of battles. Winning is easy; losing is not.

  “So, you can go through life afraid of losing—avoiding battles—or you can become a warrior and learn how to lose.” He looked at the kids. “That sounds funny. But what do we all really want? We want peace of mind. We’d love to win every battle we ever fight, but what we really want is not to be afraid of what losing entails. We fear the broken nose. We fear the broken heart. We fear the broken spirit. We fear what people will think of our failure. We fear letting others down. We fear being the victim. We fear knowing that we are just like everyone else—limited in strength and influence and power. And all we really want is not to care about these things—not to worry about our own fear.

  “A warrior doesn’t worry about fear because fear is just another battle that could be lost. A warrior accepts all losses. And yet fights to win. Always. A warrior fights, but always with his or her eyes open.”

  The kids stared up at Jan Lee, unblinkingly.

  “So—and this is your first lesson—be of two minds. One mind that knows that you will win. One mind that knows you can lose. Enter all encounters in life with the firm belief that you cannot lose. Fight your best fight. But, when the time comes, when you do lose, accept that loss with grace and pride. You have lost only because you have tried.

  “Here—in this dojo—you will learn how to fall. You will learn how not to be humiliated or surprised by such matters. How not to sit there thinking, ‘Wow, I’m now the person who got knocked down by so-and-so.’

  “We are all the person who got knocked down by so-and-so. And strength comes from accepting this fact. The ability to get back up quickly comes from accepting this fact—”

  “If you can,” a little boy said. “If you can get back up.”

  “That’s true,” Jan Lee agreed. “Warriors can lose, warriors can be scarred, and sometimes warriors die.”

  Lauren couldn’t help but look at Ellis.

  “But remember,” Jan Lee said, “peace of mind is always worth that trade-off.” He tapped on his temple. “Be of two minds.”

  Jan Lee signaled to someone off camera, and two men in karate uniforms stepped onto the mats. The men bowed. The kids moved back.

  Jan Lee and the men stepped into fighting stances.

  No one moved for a long moment.

  Then came a barrage of kicks and punches. Jan Lee was on the attack until one of the men managed to grab him from behind. They struggled. Jan Lee took a punch to the face, then flipped the man behind into the one in front.

  “Wow, nice move.” Lauren replayed it.

  Ellis made a disapproving growl.

  “What? That was cool,” Lauren said.

  Jan Lee dominated once again with rapid-fire punches and kicks, but when one of the men swept his legs and pinned him to the floor, and the other was about to strike, he tapped out.

  Jan Lee bowed to his opponents. All three bowed to the kids.

  “Remember,” Jan Lee said as the two men left the floor, “for one who knows he can lose, there is no surprise, no shame, no life-changing introspection. Loss is merely one of the possible outcomes of all of our battles. A warrior is simply one who accepts this.”

  Lauren paused the video. “Like I said, he doesn’t seem like the type. And this…” She brought up another page, with a photo of a beautiful young woman embracing a child. “This is his wife and son at the time. I’m telling you, he just doesn’t seem like a candidate for suicide.”

  “Where are they now?” Ellis asked. “The wife and son.”

  “Both live in Asheville, North Carolina. The son, Stephen Lee, is a professor at the University of North Carolina; the wife, Lisa Lee, is a professor at Mountain State College. He’s thirty-five, married, has two kids. She’s fifty-eight, never remarried. Also—and this was a little hard to find, but—they own a holding company that owns a majority stake in Space America Corp.”

  “And that’s significant?”

  “Space America Corp. is the company that formed from the remnants of JL Aerospace after the
Space Station Bombing. Following the bombing, Lisa Lee very publicly sold her stock in all her husband’s former ventures. It seems weird that she would then turn around and secretly invest back into this one.”

  “Well, we were wondering who might have motive to steal the crystal,” Ellis said. “Maybe we don’t have to look any further than his family.”

  “Now that might be something to worry about.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because if there’s anyone who doesn’t need to win the lottery, it’s got to be the Lees.”

  Lauren looked out at the brightening horizon. They had started their descent into Houston.

  Chapter 12

  Lauren and Ellis took an auto-cab from Ellington Field to the Johnson Space Center’s Air and Space Museum. It was warmer here in Houston, nearly eighty degrees.

  Lauren checked her messages. Nothing new on the Los Alamos robbery; Helios had arrived at Sea-Tac; and AFCS (American Flight Command Services) had successfully filed their flight plan for their trip to North Carolina later today.

  At the museum, they proceeded to the Department of Archives, where they were to meet the Director of Archives, Dr. Desiree Adams. Entering a large room of cubicles, Lauren could sense the frequency shift as the worker bees communicated the presence of strangers throughout the hive.

  A minute later, the queen bee, Dr. Adams, emerged from an actual office. She moved gracefully across the floor.

  Dr. Adams looked to be in her late fifties, had bronze skin and dark brown hair, and was elegantly dressed in a long beige and brown dress and a gold rope necklace.