As she looked down from the mezzanine railing, sparks erupted below. She went down, each and every step groaning under her weight. The opposite end of the warehouse was a black hole, save for those startling sparks.
At the foot of the stairs an arm, long and powerful grabbed her own and pulled her back into a side room. Shafts of light in the center, streaming in through a window, blinded Lexi. She spluttered a little scream of surprise. The arm recoiled and withdrew into the room. As eyes adjusted to the brilliant fluorescent light, Lexi saw a dark seated figure. Its face was hidden beneath a wrinkled fedora.
“Lewis?”
“He said the hand is complete, that it’s my mind preventing it from working. He says I’m weak.”
Except for the corners, the room was so brilliant that every color melded into liquid white. The black man emerged as a silhouette. He was cradling his right hand and rocking. Pain was obvious in the tear ruts marring his otherwise smooth ebony face.
“It’s called . . . parasympathetic lethargy,” her voice somehow both soft and substantial. “I read something about this during my research into empathy.” She sat on the bed, recalling her days as a clinical psychologist, back when she still held hope of finding a way to feel . . . normal. “The mind is a big old mass of contradictions, sometimes posing warring thoughts. It was theorized that with bionics the mind might attempt to psychologically reject the new material, even though it is, by nerves, connected. You need to make a constant, conscious effort to overcome this contradiction. Here, look at your hand,” she took and held up his right hand.
“Call it yours. Believe that it is your hand. That is the first step.”
Lewis blinked before turning his attention to the bionic appendage. “This is my hand. It is under my control. I sound like a dumb ass.”
“No. You were doing good. Keep going.”
“Everything I did with my old hand, I can do with this one.” He bit his tongue as though suddenly pained. “I felt something.”
She had forgotten about the scraping sound now, and it had become no more than the ringing in her ears; hardly noticeable except when she focused on it. “I think your mind is resisting, interpreting the signals of your control of the hand as pain. Try again, fight through it.”
As Lewis practiced, Satan jumped up into Lexi’s lap. “Hey, where have you been, you bad little kitty-boy?”
“Look!” Lewis yelled a few minutes later, sweat drenching his shirt front. “Look, I can bend it.”
For the first time Lexi noticed a genuine smile on his face and even his stench failed to prevent gratification. “You’ve forgotten the pain, haven’t you?” She pointed at his leg.
“Yeah, I guess so. Wow, you really are as good as your file says.”
Lexi stood up, holding Satan and studying Lewis. “Leslie watched his mother die a protracted death, didn’t he?”
Lewis scrunched up his features. “How the hell you know that?”
“I’m a psychologist,” she shrugged. “More importantly, how does he intend to help us find and stop Dorl if the government is helping him?”
Lewis sighed and lowered his hand. “Some things you’re better off not knowing. You should process your flash drive on Leslie’s computer upstairs. Go on.” When he refused to answer any more questions, Lexi retreated to the office to search for proof of Gramps’ obsession.
Four days passed in a haze as Lexi remained upstairs, working on the images from the flash drive and on the dreams, while Lewis progressed with his psychological exercises. On the fifth day in the factory, Leslie came up to visit.
“They’re close.” Just like that. No warning that their interlude of peace was over. “I set up some diversions, but I’m a little too old school and they got more money than Mr. Monopoly.”
“We have to leave?”
“I know, it’s a real pisser.” He threw his feet on to the desk and glanced at the pad Lexi had been using to record her dreams. “You figure out Virgil’s cipher?”
“Apparently only unconsciously. I noticed the connection as well from the pictures I took. Half of the letters between Gramps and Silas were coded using these symbols. But I haven’t found the cipher.”
“Give it to Lewis. He may be a lug, but he spent two years in the SCIA basement decoding before becoming a field operative. He’ll know a few tricks. Grab your things and follow me downstairs. I got a present for you.”
Lewis worked in the SCIA? What if he still works there?
She tried to follow exactly in Leslie’s footsteps, but where his were all silent, hers awoke every other tread. The heady scent of paint fumes filled the sun-splashed air as they walked across the factory floor.
At first she thought Leslie had bought a new truck; for her dull rusty Dakota sat prim and proud with a fresh coat of dashing yellow paint trimmed in black stripes. The rims gleamed and the rust speckled fenders were flat and smooth. It positively glowed.
“Oh. My. God.”
“I replaced the shocks and oiled the doors,” Leslie scratched his grease beard and smirked. “Yeah, I tuned the engine so you could make it all the way there in one piece.” He turned his head toward the back room. “Hey lug wrench, get your ass out of bed.”
Lexi reached for the truck but Leslie leapt forward. “Ah ah, you want to be careful for a few days, especially in the cold. The top coat’s dry but it’ll take a while to completely cure.”
An alarm screamed. Leslie raised his voice over it: “Hurry the fuck up, Lewis! They’re on their way!” Turning back to Lexi, he jeered, “It’s gonna be one hell of a pisser.”
Chapter 20
1951 – Arfion
Virgil stepped off the bus, rustling clouds of dust round his feet. “Nevada,” he murmured as the man behind nudged him. The map from Howard Hughes was loaded with meaningless numbers and codes (to frustrate any potential thieves, according to Hughes) but Virgil had managed to decipher the coordinates.
They indicated a tract of land sixty-eight miles northwest of Las Vegas where Hughes suspected the Tower was conducting electromagnetic experiments.
Considering the source of the map, Virgil wondered just how much reality there could be at the end of this dusty rainbow. And just how could Hughes possibly know where to look if he wasn’t in cahoots with the Tower?
He waited until dusk to begin the trek north, suspicious of even the gas station attendant who looked at him the wrong way. Arfion, which, despite not being marked on any map, Hughes was convinced existed, was supposedly reached via Lands End Road which was really stretching reality, as the ‘Road’ was just a dirt path in the desert.
Virgil picked up his leather satchel filled with canteens of water, a high-end Kodak 35mm (with extra film) and few other accoutrements, and headed north. As a New Yorker he prided himself on being prepared for all types of weather at all times; but he had imagined the Nevada desert would be hot—even at night. The swift detrude in temperature caught him while he took a leak. The howling of distant mammals in the endless expanse did little to reassure him.
“Keep walking, Virge. Keep the blood flowing, keep moving. He’s out here somewhere.”
Another day and night passed. Complete and utter solitude.
He lay on his back looking up at the canvas of the black sky, flecked with a million shimmering beads of light. This was a sight the city boy had never seen. Then came something that perhaps no one had ever seen: a thin line of moving light passed by his field of vision. It disappeared so quickly that he wondered if he had even seen it at all.
He looked again but found nothing and chalked it up to corner-of-the-eye-syndrome, a phenomenon he referred to as COTES.
As he rose—his knees creaking with the beginning stage of arthritis—a whip crack of lightning on the horizon rent the darkness. Another streak, larger and more pronounced than the first, sent Virgil to his knees. Again and again streaks split the night and the air crackled. But what terrified him, what drove him to the edge of panic was the realization that these
bolts were ascending.
They were originating from the desert floor.
He reminded himself why he was there and his legs did the rest, carrying him towards the unnatural phenomenon that filled the air with the sobering stench of expended energy.
There are times in our lives when all things seem possible—terrifying moments of revelation. Never had Virgil experienced such a strong, humbling moment than when he climbed an escarpment in the middle of the great American nowhere and looked on a world seemingly divergent from reality.
Lights twitched and snapped off with audible clicks while others hummed along; metal rods stretched high as skyscrapers, their midsections wrapped in sporadic spider webs of blue light. Jutting from the center of an enormous building was what looked to Virgil to be the world’s largest telescope. It was from this protruding shaft that the bolts of lightning were originating.
Virgil whistled a tune of admiration that was quickly lost to the crackling sounds of energy. He had no idea how to enter the facility without being seen. “Come on Virge, think.”
His musings were for naught though, for the black sky broke as the sun appeared on the horizon and a metal shaft came whizzing out of nowhere, breaking his nose. Pain passed quickly as the shaft zipped around to strike the back of his head. Merciful blackness took him.
Shadows at the edge of consciousness.
Virgil dispelled these gloomy curtains with a grunt and a formidable will forged through years on the force. “Congratulations, you caught an unarmed man by sneaking up on him.” His mouth tasted of the desert and he hacked. “Well? Talk to me. I’m sure you didn’t take me just for kicks, sure as sure.”
“Mr. Montaigne,” a voice, clear and with an indefinable accent. “You are most tenacious. This is not a trait I value.”
Finally, I have finally found him. As he lay flat on a cold steel table, Virgil’s spirit lifted. His eyelids did not. He had to keep them clamped shut to protect them from a light so dazzling it exposed the tendrils of veins in his lids. “What are you doing out here, Dorl?”
“Enthrall him,” said the accented man.
Footsteps pronounced Dorl’s exit and when at last Virgil found himself alone in the silence, the light winked out and he opened his eyes. He struggled with his bonds until the ineffable report of footsteps, rubber soles on concrete, filled his ears. Someone hacked, grabbed his chains.
“What are you doing?”
“Keep your voice down, Virgil, you’ll bring him back.”
“Silas?” He asked and the voice gave ascent. “What are you doing with this terrorist?”
His old associate undid the chains, hacking sporadically. His face was hidden in shadows but a dim light in the corner offered Virgil a scant view of the man’s familiar gaunt frame.
“You need to stop chasing us. Everything we’re doing here is to prevent what’s coming.” Silas sighed and helped Virgil to his feet. “You have no idea. And I can’t explain it. You wouldn’t believe me. Just believe this: there is no more important work in the world than what we are doing here,” spreading his arms wide to indicate the entire facility.
Silas continued, “He will disappear both of us if he finds out I didn’t give you the full dose of SOH. I can’t do that to you, but I can’t risk t risk you coming back with the authorities either.” Silas injected Virgil with a quarter of the serum inside the glass syringe, and injected the remainder into a coffee cup.
As Virgil lay still a moment, confusion crinkling his features, Silas leaned in close and whispered, “I just saved your life. Don’t make me regret it.”
After being shoved through a door that was promptly slammed behind him, Virgil leaned against the wall of a hallway. Head swimming, he couldn’t seem to grab hold of anything real. He gingerly touched the lumps on the back and front of his head before fleeing down the hall.
It was dark outside. Apparently he’d been out of commission all day. He ran, refusing to look back for fear of being seen or giving his body time to retch. When his knees and hips felt as dry and stiff as the baked desert floor and the agony had become too much to bear, Virgil collapsed. Sometime later, when his head was no longer swimmy, he sat up and looked back at the way he’d come.
Full on dark. No stars.
He jumped when a bolt of lightning sizzled a few miles to the north. It streaked up into the sky, surviving for a dozen seconds. A second bold ascended to the heavens in its wake.
This light show continued through the night, the tendrils varying by degrees of intensity and length and duration. When dawn broke ages later, it was met with sudden silence. No bolts of lightning to rival it. It was almost as if someone had switched off the incredible outbursts with the flick of a switch.
The trek back to the little town outside Vegas took a night and a day, his throat paying the tax for his lack of water. But the crap hole with its broke-down gas station appeared in the distance at last, a mirage as welcome as it was simple. He guzzled hose water. In his pocket he found the exact change necessary for the bus fare, and bought a ticket.
He did not remember bringing change.
A plane ride followed the bus ride.
Eons later he arrived at his doorstep.
Following fifteen straight hours of shuteye, Virgil wrote a letter to Hughes, obeying all the anal procedures. In it he warned about Dorl’s intent to harness electricity to possibly create some kind of lightning weapon. It was a theory anyway.
By the end of that week he could not recall his time in the facility in Arfion. Virgil only remembered going to Nevada, wandering around in the desert, and then taking the bus back to Sky Haven Airport in North Las Vegas. One day he received a letter from Hughes along with his check. It read: Thank you for counsel, Nevada a bust. Have reason to suspect Dorl is heading to Prague. Continue search there.
Without knowing why, but sure that he was right, Virgil suspected Hughes of duplicity. TRUST NO ONE was now seared into the backs of his eyes.
Chapter 21
“Thank you for everything, Leslie,” Lexi said to the floor as Leslie stood before her. “Are you sure you won’t come with us?”
“Ah, my rough-rider days are over.” He moved close to her and whispered, “I would tell you to trust Lewis, but that is a bad habit to get into. If you have half the instincts of your grandfather you’ll do fine. Trust yourself. Now go.”
As Lexi wrapped a blanket around Satan’s carrier and entered the cab, Leslie yelled for Lewis too move his ass one final time. The Dakota roared to life instantly. “Thank you, Leslie.” Lewis hopped in and they drove through the overhead doorway, Leslie slamming the door closed behind them. “What will they do to him if they find out he helped us?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Lewis muttered, situating some folders between the seats.
Lexi scowled at him. “Back to your four word phrases, huh? That’s called regression you know. It means your falling back into your old self and you—”
“Yeah thanks, I don’t need a shrink.” He kept stealing glances at the mirror.
“What’s eating you?”
When he didn’t respond Lexi knew better than to push, so she pressed the PLAY button on the CD player. Instead of the well worn and excitable tones of Beethoven, a soprano saxophone hummed out a melancholy beat, accompanied by a trumpet a bit too ambitious for a duo.
“Eew, what is this garbage?” She switched it off and searched for Beethoven.
They were about five miles from the factory, approaching the 219 when it happened. She didn’t feel it in the truck, but the mirrors reflected hell and the sky behind transformed from dreary autumn grays to violent oranges and yellows. Black clouds billowed a half mile high.
“What the hell was that?” Lexi screamed, slowing down.
“Don’t you dare stop!” Using his augmented hand, Lewis forced her leg down against the accelerator. “Don’t you make him die for nothing.” He stared straight ahead without blinking, his face a mask.
Glancing back and forth
between the mirrors and the long road ahead, Lexi’s jaw ached with the urge to cry. “How could he do that? Why didn’t he just come with us?” Faces flashed in the bilious clouds, faces of men who had died giving her one more piece to the puzzle that was the Tower. “He could still be alive if he—”
“Don’t be a fucking moron,” Lewis growled. “We wouldn’t have escaped if he hadn’t sacrificed himself as a distraction. They’ll be at that site for days now while we move closer to the Tower. So just shut up and drive.” He placed his faded leather fedora over his face; the sign that nothing further would be said.
Even Beethoven could not soothe her. She was a fugitive with an unstable agent operating with God-knew-what incentive, with gigabytes of coded data and no way to interpret it.
They drove for miles over a network of New York roads, heading . . . Lexi realized she didn’t even know. The inclination to ask shook loose a memory of something Linnux had said. The hodge-podge of his words seemed an alphabet soup of a memory and she struggled to organize them, letting her subconscious mind control her driving.
“What did he say? Come on Alexis, think!” she punched her leg a few times. As if this punishment dislodged something, she recalled Linnux’s words: ‘That was why your Gramps failed. He was looking in the present when he should have looked to the past.’
A smile. “Thank you Linnux.”
Lexi pulled over and slapped Lewis awake. “Hey FBI guy, where to now?”
“What?” he slowly climbed out of the yellow truck to stretch. “Don’t say FBI out loud.”
“I don’t know where we are since you SOB guys never give straight answers. Where are we going?”
“Back to Batavia, to the old Massey-Harris factory.” He popped a few Tylenol, climbed back into the truck and hid under his fedora.
“I’m an FBI chauffeur,” throwing her hands up. She climbed in and dropped into gear.
The Fifth Descent of Lexi Montaigne Page 12
