Sky Key

by James Frey

  “Coast looks clear.” Jago lowers the scope.

  “We’ll have to leave the rifles.”

  “You still got that pistol, though, right?”

  “Yep.”

  Jago rescans the platform. A young mother holding the hand of a three-year-old. A blue-collar worker in a jumpsuit. The businessman, who’s now reading his paper.

  Jago squints, focuses the eyepiece.

  The businessman is wearing what looks to be a very nice suit—and black tactical boots.

  “Mierda.”

  “What is it?”

  “Hand me your rifle.”

  Sarah does it without asking. Jago shoulders it, aims, pulls the secondary trigger that fires the undermounted dart gun.

  The projectile puffs out of the chamber with a low whoosh and pop. The man is too far away and doesn’t hear it. The overhead digital sign several feet past him announces that a new Edgware Road–bound train will arrive in one minute. The man steps back at the last split second, and the dart just misses his neck, clanking into an advertising panel.

  The man drops his paper and sets his feet wide, looks left and right. Holds a hand to his ear and says something. Jago pulls back from the top of the steps.

  “No good. Gotta go back.”

  “Someone see you?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Christ, Jago. You don’t think so?”

  Maybe he’s getting sloppy too. Too much forgetting, too much Burger King, too much sex.

  Sarah stands and looks, and there he is. Already 20 paces closer. The businessman sprinting, his hat fallen off, a pistol in his hand.

  Jago brings the rifle up and without sighting pulls the secondary trigger again. Another dart. It hits the man in the cheek, just below his eye. He recoils and falls, slides along the concrete only 47 feet away. He comes to a stop. He rolls. Paws at his face, the bushy-tailed dart hanging out of it. He fights for consciousness, but it’s no use. He passes out.

  The young mother screams.

  The Players turn and run. The light from the station recedes. Sarah flicks on her headlamp. She’s several feet in front of Jago when they feel the air change, the light coming for them.

  The Edgware Road train.

  Sarah kicks it into high gear. She slams into the safety of one of the cutouts as the train comes into view, her shoulder crunching into the concrete wall.

  But Jago’s not there. He couldn’t run as fast. He’s only 13 feet away, but it might as well be a mile. He looks at her. She can see his eyes, wide and white.

  Sarah screams, “Down!” as the train barrels by, cutting off her view of Jago.

  The train’s horn sounds. It doesn’t slow. A loud smack and sparks and a small explosion. The rifle being impacted by the front of the train. All she hears after that is the machine churning in front of her, the movable storm of wind, the Doppler effect of the blaring horn.

  Again, Sarah looks into the blurred interior passing just in front of her, this time through glassy eyes. And this time there are no people on it. None. Until the last car, which is full of men dressed in all black.

  Men with lots and lots of weapons.

  The train didn’t slow because they saw him. They saw him and they wanted him dead.

  The train finally brakes as it disappears around the corner and pulls into the station. She has maybe one minute to get to the other tunnel. She glances into the well between the tracks. Doesn’t see any sign of him. Squints. Raises her eyes. There, in the darkness, a piece of cloth floating through the air and settling on the rail.

  A piece of cloth that matches Jago’s shirt.

  She takes a step forward to see what else she might find, but freezes when she hears voices in the distance. Men, frantic and yelling.

  No time.

  She shakes with fear. No time to see what’s left of Jago Tlaloc.

  Fear.

  She rubs her sleeve over her eyes and vaults onto the tracks and runs away.

  Runs away from another death.

  Another death of someone she loved.

  AISLING KOPP

  JFK International Airport, Terminal 1 Immigration Hall, Room E-117, Queens, New York, United States

  Aisling has been sitting in the room for one hour and three minutes. No one has come to see her, no one has brought her water or a bag of chips, no one has spoken to her over an intercom. The room is empty except for a table and a chair and a steel ring in the floor and a bank of fluorescent lights in the ceiling. The table and chair are both metal with rounded edges and welded joints. Both are secured to plates that are set in the concrete floor. The walls are blank, painted white with a yellow tint. There are no pictures, no shelves, no vents. There isn’t even a two-way mirror.

  But Aisling is being watched. There’s no doubt about that. Somewhere in this room are a camera and a microphone. Probably several. Because there are no dangerous items in the room, the men who brought her here didn’t even handcuff her. They just put her in the chair and left. She has not moved from the chair. She has been meditating since the door closed and the bolts inside the door slid into the locked position. Three of them. They were whisper quiet, but she still heard them.

  One, two, three.

  Shut in. This, she thinks, is worse than the Italian cave.

  She lets the things that come to her mind arrive and pass. Or tries to, anyway. Just because she’s a Player doesn’t mean she’s an expert at everything. Shooting, fighting, tracking, climbing, surviving. Solving puzzles. Languages. Those are what she’s really good at. Centering herself, opening her mind, all that om om om bullshit, not so much.

  Although all that shooting practice couldn’t help her take down that fucking float plane when it mattered most.

  When it might have saved the world.

  Let it pass. Let it pass.

  Breathe.

  Let it pass.

  She does. The images and feelings come and go. Memories. The rain lashing her face as she sits on the northeastern gargoyle’s head on top of the Chrysler Building. The taste of wild mushrooms scavenged from the Hudson Valley. Her heaving lungs pushing out water when she nearly drowned in Lough Owel, Ireland. The creeping fear that she can’t win, or doesn’t deserve to win, or shouldn’t win, the doubt that every Player who isn’t a sociopath must confront. The bright blue of her father’s eyes. The spooky voice of kepler 22b. The escape from the Great White Pyramid. The regret that her crossbow bolt didn’t skewer the Olmec in the attic of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. The anger over what the cave paintings showed her in Italy. The anger that the Players are being played by the keplers. The anger that it’s not fair. The anger from knowing that Endgame is a bunch of bullshit. The anger.

  Let it pass.

  Let it pass.

  Breathe.

  The door whispers. One, two, three. The latch turns. Aisling doesn’t open her eyes. Listens, smells, feels. Just one person. The door closes. Whispers. One, two, three.

  Shut in.

  A woman. She can tell by the smell of her soap.

  Light-footed. Steady breathing. Maybe she meditates too.

  The woman crosses the room and stops on the other side of the table.

  She introduces herself: “Operations Officer Bridget McCloskey.” The woman’s voice is raspy, like a lounge singer’s. She sounds big. “That’s my real name. Not some cover bullshit, Deandra Belafonte Cooper . . . Or should I say Aisling Kopp?”

  Aisling’s eyes shoot open. Their gazes lock. McCloskey is not what Aisling expects.

  “So you admit your passport is a fake,” McCloskey says.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I say Aisling Kopp, your eyes pop open. That’s an admission in my book, a hundred times out of a hundred.”

  “What book is that? Fifty Shades of Grey? Letters to Penthouse?”

  McCloskey shakes her head with a look of disappointment. She’s in her early 40s. Like Aisling she has red hair, except that hers has a Bride of Fran
kenstein streak running from her forehead all the way through to the tip of her tight ponytail. She’s leggy and stacked and flat-out hot, like a Playboy bunny just a few years past her prime. She has eyeglasses with teal frames and very little makeup. Her eyes are green. Her hands are veined and strong, the only giveaway that she’s the real deal. She must have been stunning when she was Aisling’s age.

  “You’d be surprised how often I hear degrading shit like that,” McCloskey says.

  “Maybe you need a new line of work.”

  “Nah. I like my job. I like talking with people like you.”

  “People like me?”

  “Terrorists.”

  Aisling doesn’t flinch and doesn’t speak. She understands that from a law-enforcement perspective any Player of Endgame could absolutely be considered a terrorist—but what does this woman know about Endgame?

  “No more smart mouth? I’ll remind you that you’ve been caught trying to cross the US border under an assumed name.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Arrest?” McCloskey chuckles. “How quaint. No, I’m not with the part of the government that arrests people, Miss Kopp. I’m with . . . another part of the government. A small and exclusive part. The one that deals with terrorists. Up close and personal like.”

  “Well, we have a problem, then, because I’m not a terrorist.”

  “Oh, dear! So you’re telling me this is all one big misunderstanding?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I’m wrong in believing you’re a member of a very old sleeper cell that, once called to action, can and will do anything to achieve its goals? That’s not you?”

  “A sleeper cell, huh? Is this a joke?”

  McCloskey shakes her head again. “No joke. Did you hear what happened in Xi’an? You have anything to do with that?”

  The mention of the Chinese city causes Aisling’s heart to quicken. A shiver runs down her neck. If she can’t head off her body’s hardwired threat response, then she might break out in a cold sweat. She can’t break out in a cold sweat. Not in front of this woman, who already seems to know a bit too much.

  “What, the meteor? Is my sleeper cell responsible for that? Lady, if I could control meteors, you can bet I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  If I could control meteors, Aisling thinks, the Event would never come.

  “No. We’ll get to the meteor soon enough. I’m talking about the dirty bomb that was set off at the residence of one An Liu a little over a week ago.”

  The name prickles Aisling’s ears. Somehow this woman has pegged the Player who is probably Endgame’s most dangerous and unpredictable. If Aisling could pick one Player to kill, it would be the Shang. Still, Aisling conceals her feelings as she wrinkles her brow and asks innocently, “Anne Liu? Who’s she?”

  “He. Another member of your sleeper cell.”

  Aisling’s heart rate rockets up, not from nervousness, but from umbrage. It never occurred to Aisling that someone might consider all the Players to be members of the same group. The concept of the 12 separate lines has been so driven into each Player—I am for my line, and the other lines are not for me—that the idea that they’re essentially the same is blasphemy.

  Blasphemy!

  And gross. To lump her in with the Shang. That twitchy freak.

  “I don’t know anyone named An Liu,” she says calmly. “And I am not part of a Chinese sleeper cell.”

  McCloskey sits on the edge of the table and inspects her fingernails. Picks at a cuticle. “Maybe sleeper cell is the wrong term. You—and An Liu—prefer to call them ‘lines.’ That ring a bell, Aisling Kopp?”

  “No,” Aisling says too quickly, immediately regretting it.

  “Uh-huh. How about this: !”

  Aisling speaks passing Arabic and she knows what it means. She tenses. Pushes so hard with her back and legs against the chair that it creaks audibly.

  “I thought so.”

  Aisling squints. “Whatever you think you know, you don’t know anything.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Kopp. I know there are twelve ancient lines, and that yours is La Tène Celt. I know that An Liu has a line too, called Shang. I know the real names of no less than five more line members, and I know that since the meteors you have all been ‘playing’ against one another for some kind of prize. And you will continue to play, until the world ends. Which, I’m sorry to say, will be pretty soon.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I wish I were, Kopp. But it’s not just that I’ve read things—some of which were given to the agency by none other than your father, Declan, back when you weren’t even out of diap—”

  “My father? Are you serious? My father was a madman,” Aisling blurts. All pretense is dropped now. No more pretending.

  “I know that. He was such a madman that his own father, your grandfather, cut him down.”

  “Yeah. I know,” Aisling whispers.

  “Good. Thank you for your honesty.”

  A few moments of silence pass between them. McCloskey picks at her nails, Aisling fumes. She knows she should keep silent, wait this woman out, but . . .

  “Why the fuck are you holding me?”

  McCloskey slides off the edge of the table and places her hands on it, pressing into its cold surface. “I’m going to be honest with you, Kopp. Not because I’ve been ordered to be honest with you, which I have, but also because I want to be. I’ve seen a lot of shit in my lifetime. Much more than you can imagine—and I suspect you can imagine a lot. I know what you are, but you have no idea what I am, or the places I’ve been and things I’ve done. The people I’ve hurt. The ways in which I’ve hurt them. I’ve seen horrible things. Mystifying things. Things that aren’t of this world—literally. I know you know what I’m talking about.”

  “You sound like my father. You sound crazy.”

  “Don’t be obtuse, Kopp. We don’t have time for it. The Event is coming. I know it and you know it. Those twelve meteors, the ones that woke your lines, your sleeper cells, they were just a prelude. Another is coming. And it will bring hell with it.”

  Aisling’s eyes widen. Her thin lips part. This is too much for an outsider to know. “How do you know all this?”

  “I told you. Your father gave us some material, and we have other sources too. We’ve even had a fair amount of contact with the Nabataean line, whose Player is a borderline sociopath named Maccabee Adlai. You know him?”

  “Not really.”

  “Sick, handsome asshole. Dealing with the Nabataeans has been both elucidating and terrifying. The first time we crossed paths with them, we got so close to finding out about Endgame that they took out just about every case agent and operations officer in Jordan, plus a few hundred civilians, including children. Just to keep us in the dark.”

  “Endgame. So you do know.”

  “I don’t know everything, but I know a lot. Most importantly—and depressingly, I might add—I know that there’s a huge monster space rock bearing down on our planet, and it’s a genie that we won’t be able to keep in the bottle, no matter how hard we try.”

  “Do you know where it’ll hit?” Aisling asks, feeling a little desperate to be asking this outsider questions.

  “More or less.” McCloskey huffs. “There’s a team of pencil pushers at NASA that thinks they have it figured out. They just spotted it in the heavens a few days ago, and given our security clearances as well as our extraterrestrial interests, we found out about it quick.”

  “Where will it hit?”

  “That’s classified.”

  “Fuck your classified. Tell me.”

  “Can’t. Not yet.”

  “When can you tell me?”

  “After you make me a promise, Kopp.”

  “What’s that?”

  McCloskey takes a moment before answering. “You know, Kopp, I didn’t want to have anything to do with you. I wanted to go a whole other direction.”

  “What direction was that?”

&
nbsp; “That’s also classified. I will say that it involved preventing our alien forebears from ever returning to Earth, though. But then those meteors hit and we knew it was too late and fuck me and all that, right?”

  “You have no idea.”

  McCloskey manages to look sympathetic. “Maybe I don’t. I know the kind of training you Players go through, and I’ve seen what some of you can do, and I’ll be the first to say it’s impressive. You’re more highly trained and capable than any special forces soldier on Earth. And some of you are more ruthless. A truly terrifying group of individuals. Anyway, it’s moot now. The game has started. The doomsday clock is ticking, and, to be totally honest, me and my associates are a little freaked out. We talked it over and after a long argument we decided to go with you.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means that if this cosmic bad joke really can be won, and if that the winner gets to guarantee the survival of her line members, then we need to make sure that you win.”

  Aisling finally gets it. She smiles. “Because you’re La Tène too.”

  McCloskey puts a finger on her nose. “Bingo. Because we’re La Tène too, just like nearly a quarter of all Americans, and about a fifth of Europeans to boot. You, Aisling Kopp, are our Player.”

  Aisling’s heart races again. This is all too much. The fact that a government spook—a nobody in the realm of Endgame—knows all this is seriously unsettling.

  It means the world is already changing, even before its end.

  McCloskey leans forward. “Here’s why you’re here, Kopp: So I can offer you our help. However, just so you know, you don’t really have a choice in the matter. We’re tagging ourselves in. Our small team of very deadly, very capable, very connected, very tooled-up people are going to help you find the keys, kill whoever you have to, and win. All the way to the bloody, bloody end.”

  Aisling sits back. Recoils, actually. She very much wants to be out of this room and away from this woman.